Chapter 8
I didn’t sleep at all that night.
I sat on the floor by the door, the paperweight in my lap, replaying every word Nathan had said. Over and over. Until the words blurred together and I couldn’t tell truth from fiction anymore.
At six a.m., I got up. I showered. I dressed in a charcoal suit that cost more than most people’s cars. I put my hair in a tight bun. I applied makeup with a steady hand.
No one looking at me would have guessed I’d spent the night with a ghost from my past clinging to my bedroom window, telling me my parents had been murdered.
At seven, we left for the courthouse.
The TRO hearing. Nathan’s lawyers were asking the judge to bar me from CloudAxis, freeze the assets, and reinstate Nathan as CEO. They’d filed a forty-page motion full of lies. That I’d “emotionally abused” Nathan during our marriage. That I’d “coerced” him into signing documents he didn’t understand. That Arthur and I had engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” to steal his company.
Arthur’s legal team was the best money could buy. Three partners from the most prestigious firm in San Francisco. Each of them billed more per hour than Nathan had paid his entire legal staff for a month.
The ride to the courthouse was silent. Arthur read over his deposition. I stared out the window.
“Emma,” Arthur said finally, without looking up from his papers. “You’ve been acting strange since last night. Did that nightmare rattle you more than you let on?”
I didn’t look at him. “Just tired.”
He closed his folder and turned to face me.
“I’ve known you since the day you were born, pumpkin,” he said. “I changed your diapers. I held you when you cried after your first heartbreak. I taught you to drive, to shoot, to negotiate a merger with a Fortune 500 CEO. I know when you’re lying to me.”
I kept my eyes on the passing buildings.
“Who was at your window last night, Emma?” he asked quietly.
My breath caught.
“The motion sensors didn’t pick up a deer,” he said. “They picked up a human male. One hundred and eighty pounds. On the north ledge. Right outside your room. We have thermal imaging. We just couldn’t get a clear enough face through the glass and the trees to make an ID. But I know it was him. Don’t you?”
I closed my eyes.
“It was Nathan,” I said.
Arthur didn’t yell. He didn’t explode. He just went very still. The way he always did when he was angry enough to kill someone with his bare hands.
“He told me something,” I said, turning to face him. “Something about Mom and Dad.”
Arthur’s face didn’t change. But his eyes flickered. Just for a fraction of a second. Long enough for me to see that he knew.
He knew exactly what Nathan was going to say.
“He said their accident wasn’t an accident,” I said. “He said Uncle William hired Nathan’s father to kill them. And that William is back. That he’s the one behind Nathan’s lawsuit. The life insurance policy. Everything.”
I searched Arthur’s face.
“And you knew,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
Arthur let out a long, slow breath. He leaned his head back against the seat.
“I’ve suspected for nineteen years,” he said quietly. “The day the police called me… I flew to the scene. I saw the skid marks. They were wrong. Too straight. Too deliberate. A drunk driver swerves. He overcorrects. He leaves messy marks. These were perfect. Like someone had aimed the car.”
He looked out the window.
“I hired investigators. The best in the world. They found the connections. The money trail. The fact that the ‘drunk’ driver had never had a DUI in his life before that night. The fact that he died in his cell three days later from a ‘seizure’ that no doctor could explain. I traced it all back to William.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.
“Because you were seven years old,” Arthur said, his voice breaking. “Because you’d just lost your mommy and daddy. Because I couldn’t look at you and tell you that your own uncle had paid to have them killed. That the blood of the only parents you’d ever know was on the hands of someone who shared your last name.”
He turned to me, and I saw tears in his eyes. I’d never seen Arthur cry. Not once. Not even at my parents’ funeral.
“I made a choice,” he said. “I was going to hunt William down. Make him pay. But he ran to London. And he covered his tracks so well that even my people couldn’t get close enough to extradite him. So I did the only thing I could. I built walls around you. I taught you to defend yourself. I made sure you’d never be vulnerable the way your parents were. And I told myself that when you were old enough… when you were strong enough… I’d tell you the truth.”
He reached out and took my hand. His was trembling.
“I was going to tell you on your thirtieth birthday,” he said. “Two more years. That was the plan. I never wanted you to carry this weight. Not when you were still young. Not when you still had a chance to be happy.”
The car pulled up to the courthouse steps. Reporters were already there. Cameras. Microphones. The Nathan vs. Emma trial had become the biggest media circus in Silicon Valley history. The poor orphan wife who’d turned out to be a billionaire heiress. The CEO husband who’d lost everything. It was catnip for the press.
Arthur squeezed my hand.
“Nathan is telling the truth about William,” he said. “But don’t you ever forget what he did to you. He stole from you. He cheated on you. He humiliated you. He took out a forty-million-dollar life insurance policy on you. Whether William put him up to it or not, Nathan made his choices. He is not your friend, Emma. He is not an ally. He is a man who will say and do anything to save himself. Including telling you the one truth he knows will shatter your world and make you question everything.”
He let go of my hand and opened the car door.
“Now,” he said, his voice hardening back into the voice of the Chairman Emeritus of Hawthorne Capital. “Let’s go destroy this lawsuit. And then we find William. And we finish this. Once and for all.”
The hearing lasted three hours.
Nathan’s lead lawyer—an aging shark named Harlan Sloan who’d made his career destroying billion-dollar marriages—did his best. He painted me as a cold, calculating gold digger who’d hidden my identity to trick an innocent man into marriage. He called Nathan to the stand.
Nathan testified with his head down. He looked broken. Humble. Remorseful. He told the judge about the “coffee shop meet-cute” that had been “carefully orchestrated” by the Hawthornes. He talked about the “pressure” he’d been under. The “emotional abuse.” The way I’d “manipulated” him into signing over his company.
He was good.
If I hadn’t lived through the last two years with him, I might have believed him myself.
Then our turn came.
Our lead lawyer—Grace Chen, a woman who’d never lost a divorce case in her twenty-year career—didn’t yell. She didn’t grandstand. She just laid out the facts, one by one, like bricks building a wall.
She showed the judge Nathan’s expense reports. The private jets. The diamond jewelry he’d bought for Madison. The trips to Cabo charged to the company card. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
She showed the security vulnerability reports. The falsified user metrics. The emails where Nathan had ordered his engineers to cover up the data breaches.
She showed the original Stanford thesis documents. The timestamps. The code comparison. Line by line, proving that Nathan’s “revolutionary algorithm” was a direct copy of my work, down to the variable names I’d used as inside jokes with my college roommate.
And then she dropped the bombshell.
The life insurance policy.
She laid the documents on the judge’s bench. Forty million dollars. Double indemnity. Taken out six months ago. Nathan as sole beneficiary.
“Your Honor,” Grace said, her voice calm and devastating. “Mr. Pierce claims he was emotionally abused and manipulated. Yet at the same time he claims to have been living in fear of my client, he took out a forty-million-dollar insurance policy on her life. A policy that pays out double if she dies in an ‘accident.’ This isn’t the behavior of a victim. This is the behavior of a man who was planning his wife’s murder.”
The judge, a no-nonsense woman in her sixties, flipped through the insurance documents. Her face got darker with every page.
She looked up at Nathan.
“Mr. Pierce,” she said. “Is this your signature on these documents?”
Nathan’s lawyer jumped up. “Objection, Your Honor—this is irrelevant to the TRO motion!”
“Overruled,” the judge said. She kept her eyes on Nathan. “Answer the question, Mr. Pierce.”
Nathan squirmed in his chair. “Y-yes, Your Honor. But it was a standard thing. All the executives at CloudAxis have policies—”
“Your policy is ten times larger than any other executive’s,” the judge said. “And it names you personally as the beneficiary. Not the company. Not a trust. You.”
She closed the folder.
“I’ve heard enough,” she said. “Mr. Pierce’s motion for a temporary restraining order is denied in its entirety. Mrs. Hawthorne—Ms. Hawthorne, I should say—remains acting CEO of CloudAxis. The company assets remain unfrozen. Mr. Pierce is to have no contact with Ms. Hawthorne, no contact with any CloudAxis employee, and is to remain at least five hundred yards away from her at all times. If I see him within a mile of her, I will hold him in contempt and throw him in jail without bail. Do I make myself clear?”
Nathan nodded, his face ashen.
The judge banged her gavel. “Court adjourned.”
We walked out of the courtroom to a blaze of camera flashes. Arthur’s arm was around my shoulders. Reporters shouted questions. We didn’t answer any of them. We walked straight to the car.
As the door closed behind us, Arthur’s phone buzzed. He looked at the screen. His face went cold.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Security at the estate,” he said. “They found a body. In the north woods. Near the cliff.”
My blood ran cold.
“Who?” I whispered.
Arthur looked at me.
“The man Nathan met in Oakland,” he said. “The ex-con. Someone slit his throat and left him for the coyotes. And they found a piece of paper in his pocket. A receipt. For a hardware store. With a signature on it.”
He turned the phone toward me.
May you like
The signature was messy. Scrawled. But I’d seen it a hundred times on legal documents. On birthday cards. On the bottom of the divorce papers I’d torn up in the boardroom.
It was Nathan’s.
