Chapter 8 - The Liquidation
The following three weeks were a masterclass in corporate and legal execution.
Grant tried everything. He tried begging. He tried flowers. He tried calling my parents, only to find out that my father—a retired federal judge—had already reviewed my divorce filing and told Grant in no uncertain terms that if he stepped foot on his property, he would be arrested for trespassing.
When begging failed, Grant tried to hire a aggressive defense lawyer to contest the prenuptial agreement and fight for joint custody.
It took Victoria Vance exactly twenty minutes in the preliminary settlement conference to destroy Grant's defense.
Sitting across the conference table at Vance & Associates, Grant and his sweat-slicked attorney sat in terrified silence as Victoria laid out the terms.
"If you contest this petition, Mr. Vance," Victoria said, her silver-rimmed glasses gleaming under the fluorescent lights, "we will immediately subpoena your firm’s internal expense ledgers. We will present these photographs of Miss Chloe Bennett to your Senior Managing Partners. We will prove that you committed corporate expense fraud while neglecting your infant daughter."
Grant’s lawyer leaned over, whispered frantically into Grant’s ear for thirty seconds, and then looked up at Victoria.
"Where does my client sign?" the lawyer asked quietly.
Grant signed everything.
He gave up all claims to the house. He agreed to full legal and primary physical custody resting with me, with supervised visitation rights every other weekend. He agreed to pay state-mandated child support, and he agreed to cover forty percent of Ivy’s future educational trust.
Two days after the settlement was signed, Grant was summoned to his firm’s executive office.
Chloe Bennett had already been quietly terminated the previous afternoon. Grant was given a choice: resign quietly without a severance package, or be fired publicly for ethics violations.
May you like
He resigned.
By the end of the month, Grant Vance—the man who had stood in my kitchen and asked where I would go without his salary—was living in a cramped, rented one-bedroom apartment on the far outskirts of the city, working a mid-level sales job at a secondary real estate firm for less than half his former income.
