David and Brenda exchanged a confused, mocking glance. “Calling your little friends for a pity party, Anna?” David sneered. “How pathetic. No one can help you now.”
They had no idea. After my father, the famously discreet and brilliant investment mogul Arthur Miller, had passed away, I didn’t just inherit his money. I inherited his empire. I inherited the controlling stake in a labyrinthine, global technology investment fund called Miller Capital Holdings. Six months ago, foreseeing this very betrayal, this inevitable act of narcissistic cruelty—a pattern my father had warned me about—this fund had secretly, through a series of shell corporations and blind trusts, bought the majority of the shares in my husband’s company. It had then, with surgical precision, orchestrated the ouster of the previous CEO and, as a final, ironic flourish, installed David as his replacement. He thought he had earned it through his own genius. He thought he was a titan of industry. In reality, he was a puppet, a placeholder, a test I had set for him, which he had just failed spectacularly.
They thought I was a simple housewife. In reality, I was the company’s true owner, the unseen, silent Chairwoman of the Board.
I hung up the phone. I looked directly into David’s eyes, which were still narrowed in a condescending smirk. He believed I had just made a hysterical, nonsensical call to a friend. He thought he had won. He thought he was holding all the cards.
“Are you quite finished with your theatrics?” he sneered. “Just sign the papers, Anna. Don’t make this any more embarrassing for yourself than it already is. I have a reputation to protect.”
I smiled, a cold, powerful, and utterly unfamiliar smile that he had never seen before. It was a predator’s smile. It was my father’s smile. “I was just thinking, David. Are you sure… you want to file for divorce when your new, prestigious CEO position… was my appointment?” I asked, my voice dangerously soft, the words dropping into the silence like stones into a still pond.
