MY HUSBAND THREW HIS WEDDING RING AT ME FOR HIS PREGNANT MISTRESS—HE HAD NO IDEA I OWNED HIS EMPIRE.

The penthouse was dark when I got home. Everett's cuff links were still on the bathroom counter, beside the cologne I'd bought him for our anniversary. Ten years of marriage reduced to two little pieces of gold he hadn't bothered to put away.

I changed into sweatpants and scrubbed the wine from my skin. The red stain stayed beneath my nails.

At one in the morning, I sat at the kitchen island with Ruth and June on speakerphone. I asked them to tell me exactly what my money could and couldn't do.

“Harborline owns a controlling voting stake,” Ruth said. “It doesn't mean you can empty a company account because you're angry. Corporate money belongs to the company. Directors have duties. There are procedures.”

“Good. I don't want revenge dressed up as law.”

June made a doubtful noise. “You want some revenge.”

“I want him to stop hurting people with power I handed him.”

I hadn't been born rich. My father repaired warehouse refrigeration units in Newark. My mother worked hospital billing. At twenty-six, I created software that helped small distributors stop losing shipments. I sold that business two years before Everett and I married. The money became mine under our prenup, which he insisted on because he thought he was protecting his future fortune from me.

I had loved his ambition back then. He had made pancakes in a tiny Connecticut apartment and cried during our wedding vows. Later, whenever he needed capital, I invested through Harborline with independent advisers so his company's books stayed clean and decisions could be challenged.

But the secrecy gave him room to invent a myth: the lone genius, the decorative wife, the mother who always knew best.

I helped build the myth. That was the part I couldn't excuse in myself.

At two fifteen, someone knocked on the apartment door.

Diane stood outside in a fur-trimmed coat, clutching a manila envelope.

“Your husband wants you gone by morning.”

“Then he'll have to talk to my lawyer.”

She pushed the envelope into my hand. Inside were divorce papers and a statement claiming I had contributed nothing to the marriage.

“You'll sign,” she said. “Everett is offering you more than you deserve.”

I turned to the last page. Under my printed name was a signature that looked almost like mine.

Almost.

“Diane,” I said quietly, “who signed this for me?”