They were smiling. His lawyers, spread out beside him like a wall, passed documents back and forth with the calm certainty of people who believed the ending was already written. Vincent leaned back in his chair, relaxed, almost bored. The expression of a man who thought he’d won before the first word was spoken.
Alexis watched them and tried to understand how it had come to this. How a marriage that once felt solid had turned into something decided by strangers in suits. She searched backward for the moment she should have seen it coming; the day something shifted and never quite returned to where it belonged.
What Vincent didn’t know, sitting there with an army behind him, was that confidence didn’t protect you from consequences. And whatever he believed he was walking away with that day, it wasn’t the victory he thought it was.