Chapter 4Mother, Aged

At two in the morning, I lay awake, listening to the steady rhythm of Chloe’s breathing beside me. We shared a bed, but there were mountains between us.

I slipped out of the room and went to the study. Her laptop was open, a single password-protected folder on the screen.

I tried our anniversary. Her birthday. Her mother’s birthday.

All incorrect.

On a dark impulse, I typed in the date we signed the Irrevocable Family Trust Agreement.

Click. The folder opened.

Inside was a document: Formal Complaint for Professional Misconduct, prepared for submission to the State Bar Association.

Complainant: Chloe.

Subject of Complaint: David.

She had taken some of the most complex and difficult cases of my career, twisted the facts, and reframed them as gross professional negligence on my part.

She had attached audio and video clips as evidence.

One was a clip of me at home, yelling in frustration after losing a tough case. She’d labeled it “Emotional Instability, Lacks Professional Temperament.”

Another was a recording of me venting to her about an unreasonable client, edited to make it sound like I held all clients in contempt and lacked professional ethics.

But the fatal blow was a hidden clause she cited from our Trust Agreement:

“In the event that either party has their professional license suspended or revoked due to personal conduct, thereby creating a joint liability risk to the family’s assets, the other party shall automatically gain sole and exclusive right of disposal over the Family Trust Fund.”

She was planning to destroy my career, get my law license revoked, and then legally seize every asset we owned.

A chill shot up my spine, cold as ice.

I forced myself to be calm. The lawyer in me took over. I took a deep breath, encrypted the entire folder, uploaded it to my private cloud server, and then meticulously erased every trace of my activity from her computer.

The second I closed the laptop, the study door creaked open.

Chloe stood there, leaning against the doorframe in her silk robe. “What are you looking for?” she asked lazily. “You woke me up.”

My heart skipped a beat, but my face remained a mask of calm. I gestured to the computer. “Just remembered a detail about the evidence for tomorrow’s hearing. Wanted to double-check.”

She stared at me for a few long seconds, then chuckled. “Such a workaholic. Have you seen the time? Our electricity bill is going to be through the roof again this quarter.”

She turned and left.

I stood frozen in the dark, a profound cold seeping into my bones.

She wanted to use the law as her weapon.

Fine. I would use the very thing I was best at to personally liquidate her.