Harper
The pen feels like a block of ice in my hand. It’s a cheap, plastic thing, the kind you find in a bank. It’s a stark contrast to the thick, cream colored paper it’s resting on. The paper probably costs more than the pen and my first month’s rent combined.
My lawyer, a woman named Ms. Albright with kind eyes and a brutally practical suit, clears her throat gently. “Harper. You just need to sign on the last page.”
I stare at the line reserved for my signature. Harper Catherine Vance. A name that no longer belongs to me. A brand I wore for five years. The ink on the page declares the partnership officially, legally, dissolved.
“The settlement,” I say, my voice a dry rustle. “It’s…”
“It’s exactly what the prenuptial agreement stipulated,” she finishes, her tone apologetic. “It’s iron clad. We looked for loopholes, angles. There are none. Damian’s attorneys are the best in the business for a reason.”
I nod. A paltry sum. Enough for a few years of rent in my tiny new apartment. Enough to exist, but not enough to live. It is, as Damian would say, a severance package. Compensation for time served.
“He called it a safety net,” I whisper, remembering the day I signed it. We were in his penthouse office, the city glittering below us. He’d slid the document across his glass desk with a reassuring smile. ‘Just a formality, darling. To protect us both.’
“It was,” Ms. Albright says, her kind eyes full of a pity I don’t want. “It was a safety net. For him.”
I pick up the pen. The plastic is smooth and unforgiving. I sign my name. The loops and swirls of my signature feel unfamiliar, like a forgery of a life I once thought was mine. I push the document back across the polished mahogany table.
“It’s done,” she says, gathering the papers into a neat stack. “You are officially a free woman, Harper.”
A free woman. It sounds like a death sentence.
Back in my apartment, the one that is starting to feel less like a temporary shelter and more like a permanent exile, Maya is waiting. She has a greasy bag of takeout and a bottle of tequila this time.
“No wine,” she declares, setting everything on my small, wobbly kitchen table. “Wine is for sadness. Tequila is for righteous fury. We are transitioning.”
I manage a weak smile. “The divorce is final.”
“Good,” she says, unscrewing the cap on the tequila and pouring two generous shots into the mismatched mugs I bought at a thrift store. “The Vance chapter is over. Time for the next book. The one where the heroine burns the whole damn world down. Drink up.”
I down the shot. The tequila is a trail of fire down my throat, startling me into the present. It’s a clean, sharp pain. I welcome it.
“Now what?” I ask, the word scraping my raw throat.
Maya’s expression darkens. She pulls her phone from her pocket, her thumb hovering over the screen. “Now, we face the enemy. I wanted to wait. I wanted to let you have a day. But it’s already everywhere. I think you need to see it. You need to let the fury build.”
“See what?”
She turns the phone around. My breath catches in my chest.
It’s a picture. Professionally taken, artfully filtered. Isla. She is standing on the balcony of the penthouse. My balcony. The one where I grew jasmine in pots. She is laughing, head thrown back, a flute of champagne in her hand. Damian’s arm is wrapped around her waist, his hand possessively on her hip. He is smiling. A real, genuine smile. The kind I saw maybe three times in five years.
The caption is simple. ‘Our new beginning.’ Tagged with a dozen luxury lifestyle accounts.
“Our,” I repeat, the word tasting like poison. The post is twelve hours old. He filed the final papers this morning.
“There’s more,” Maya says, her voice grim. She swipes.
A new picture. Isla, preening in front of the large abstract painting in the penthouse foyer. A painting I chose. She is wearing a cocktail dress, and around her neck is a cascade of diamonds and sapphires. My diamonds and sapphires.
The Vance necklace. A gift from Damian on our second anniversary. An ostentatious, heavy thing I wore to his corporate galas. Seeing it on her delicate, undeserving neck makes my stomach clench.
“He gave her my necklace,” I say, my voice dangerously quiet.
“‘Something blue for my bride to be!’” Maya reads from the caption, her voice thick with disgust. “Bride to be? The ink isn’t even dry on your divorce papers and he’s already engaged to the intern?”
My fingers curl into fists on the tabletop. The rage is a slow burn, starting deep in my belly.
Swipe.
Isla, posing on a private jet. Her feet, clad in ridiculously expensive heels, are propped up on the seat opposite her. On the table next to her is a leather bound book. An art book.
The caption: ‘Time to get a little culture! Off to Florence with the man who shows me what true beauty is.’
Florence.
The city I begged him to take me to for years. I wanted to see the Uffizi with him, to show him the brushstrokes of Botticelli, to explain the genius of Brunelleschi’s dome. He always said it was too touristy. Too dusty. A waste of a good vacation that could be spent networking in Monaco or Dubai.
“He took her to Florence,” I choke out. The betrayal is a physical thing, a sharp knife twisting in my ribs. It’s more painful than the divorce, more humiliating than the necklace. He took my dream and gave it to her as a trinket.
“The little troll probably thinks the David is a statue of some guy who was good at golf,” Maya snarls. “Don’t let it get to you, Harper. She’s a placeholder. A shiny new toy.”
But I can’t stop. It’s a compulsion. “Show me the rest.”
She hesitates, then swipes again. A flood of images. Isla in the Boboli Gardens. Isla eating gelato on the Ponte Vecchio. Isla posing coquettishly in front of the Duomo.
In every picture, she is wearing a piece of my life. The Cartier watch Damian gave me for my thirtieth birthday. The pearl earrings I inherited from my mother. A silk scarf I bought in Paris on our honeymoon.
Each photo is a carefully curated performance of cruelty. A public declaration that my life, my taste, my very identity was nothing more than a template for him to copy and paste onto a newer, younger model.
“It’s a calculated campaign,” Maya says, her eyes flashing. “They’re not just moving on. They are actively trying to erase you. To humiliate you into silence.”
I just stare at the screen, my mind a cold, buzzing void. The tequila has done its job. The sadness is gone, burned away. All that’s left is the ash, and something hard and sharp crystallizing within it.
“There’s one more,” Maya says softly. “It was posted an hour ago. It’s… it’s the worst one.”
I nod, bracing myself. “Show me.”
She turns the phone. The image is of Isla. She’s not on vacation anymore. She’s in the library of the penthouse. My library. My one sanctuary in that cold, sterile home.
She is sitting in my favorite reading chair, a worn leather wingback I’d fought to bring from my old apartment. She’s curled up, wearing one of Damian’s cashmere sweaters, a mug cradled in her hands.
It’s not the chair or the sweater that makes the air leave my lungs. It’s what is on the small table beside her. Next to her mug, placed as if by accident but with surgical precision, is a small, tarnished silver locket.
My grandmother’s locket.
The one thing I thought I had lost in the move. The one thing I’d cried over, thinking it had been accidentally thrown away by the movers Damian hired.
But it wasn’t lost. It was there. He let her have it. Or worse, she took it. A trophy from her conquest.
The caption reads: ‘Cozy nights in are the best. Feeling so at home.’
Home. She is in my home, in my chair, with my grandmother’s locket, calling it her own.
Something inside me snaps. Not with a loud crack, but with a quiet, terrifying click. The humming in my head stops. Everything becomes still. The world sharpens into perfect, painful focus.
“Harper?” Maya’s voice is distant, worried.
I push her phone away, turning my gaze from the screen to the wall of my small, empty apartment. I see the two cardboard boxes still sitting by the door. The ones filled with my old life. My art books. My research. My passion.
Useless. A waste of his money.
“He can have the penthouse,” I say, my voice devoid of all emotion. “He can have the money and the company and the social status. She can have the dresses and the diamonds and the vacations.”
I stand up, my movements steady and deliberate. I walk over to the boxes and slice open the tape on the first one with my thumbnail.
“Harper, what are you doing?” Maya asks, coming to stand behind me.
I reach inside and pull out a heavy book. ‘The Connoisseur’s Eye: Discerning Value and Forgery in Renaissance Art.’ Professor Albright’s seminal work.
I trace the gold lettering on the spine with my fingertip. It feels like coming home.
“But that locket,” I say, turning to face her. My eyes are dry. I will not cry. Not one more tear for that man or the life he stole. “That locket was my grandmother’s. It was my history. He didn’t buy it. He has no right to it. And she has no right to wear it.”
The rage is no longer hot. It is ice. A cold, quiet resolve that settles deep in my bones.
He thinks my knowledge is useless. Decorative. A bad investment.
He wanted a beautiful, silent accessory.
He is about to find out what happens when the art speaks back.
