“You keep calling this a trap because you don’t like what your behavior looks like when money isn’t available to excuse it.”
The attorney slid a second folder onto the table.
Sebastian’s eyes locked onto it.
“What’s that?”
“My next decision,” Jasmine said.
Inside were the documents her legal team had prepared after the phone call two years earlier.
When Jasmine had said, “I’m ready,” she had not been asking them to break her grandfather’s condition.
She had been telling them she was ready to stop hoping Sebastian would become the man she had married.
For two years, she had prepared for the moment the 10-year restriction ended.
She had documented the affair through the information already available to her: hotel charges, messages she had seen, dates Sebastian had openly spent with Natasha, and the humiliations they no longer bothered hiding.
She had written down incidents inside the home.
She had photographed personal belongings Monica removed.
She had preserved what she could without turning herself into someone obsessed with revenge.
Most importantly, she had worked with her attorneys to understand how to leave cleanly while keeping the inheritance her grandfather entrusted to her administered separately from the marriage.
The folder in front of Sebastian contained divorce papers.
He stared at the first page.
Then at Jasmine.
“You’re divorcing me?”
“Yes.”
His expression was almost offended.
After the affair.
After Natasha sitting at their table.
After years of calling Jasmine broken, useless and inadequate, Sebastian still looked genuinely stunned that she had developed the ability to walk away.
Patricia leaned toward Jasmine immediately.
“Now, sweetheart, nobody needs to make decisions while emotions are high.”
Sweetheart.
Jasmine had not heard Patricia call her that once in ten years.
“I’m not emotional,” Jasmine said.
Patricia reached for her hand.
Jasmine moved it away.
“We’re family,” Patricia insisted.
Jasmine glanced at Natasha.
A few minutes earlier, Patricia had been smiling at Sebastian’s mistress across the dinner table while they discussed the future of the family as though Jasmine had already disappeared.
“You made your definition of family very clear,” Jasmine said.
Monica attempted a different strategy.
“We all say things when we’re angry.”
“You wore my mother’s necklace for years.”
Monica looked at the table.
“That wasn’t anger.”
Natasha stood.
Sebastian immediately turned to her.
“Where are you going?”
She picked up her handbag.
“I need to think.”
“Think about what?”
Natasha gave him a look that answered the question.
For months, Sebastian had presented himself to her as the powerful one in the marriage.
Jasmine was supposedly the dependent wife who contributed nothing important.
He had made Natasha feel as though replacing Jasmine would be an upgrade in every measurable way.
Now that story had collapsed.
Jasmine watched Natasha calculate what else Sebastian might have lied about.
“How much of what you told me was true?” Natasha asked him.
Sebastian flushed.
“Don’t do this right now.”
Natasha laughed, but there was no cruelty in the sound this time.
Only disbelief.
