As the car pulled away, I looked through the tinted glass and saw Prescott standing motionless on the steps, trying and failing to understand what he was seeing. He had no idea that the man driving toward me through the city was the same man he had mocked as a grease monkey.
I spent that night in a Rittenhouse penthouse Prescott did not know existed because it sat inside a blind trust his name had never touched. My father had bought it years earlier and kept it waiting the way people keep emergency supplies they pray they will never need. He did not come upstairs when he dropped me off. He only looked once at my split lip and the mark on my cheek, then at the city beyond the windshield, and said, “Sleep. In the morning we finish it.”
By sunrise my phone had become a weapon vibrating itself across the kitchen island. Prescott had called more than forty times. Adeline had texted a dozen. I made coffee, drank it black, and sat watching the phone buzz while dawn climbed over the city.
When I finally opened Prescott’s messages, they came in waves: rage, command, threat, insult, panic, then rage again. I had been removed from all shared accounts. My key fob to the townhouse had been deactivated. My cards were cancelled. The concierge had been told to dispose of my belongings. I was a parasite. I would be broke by noon. No one would believe me. He would destroy my reputation. I had no last name without him.
Adeline’s texts were somehow worse because they were so stupid. “I hope you kept your mop and bucket.” “You’ll get nothing in the divorce.” “You really thought a family like ours would let a girl like you take anything?”
I laughed out loud in my marble kitchen. The sheer delusion of people who were already insolvent threatening me with poverty would have been hilarious even if it hadn’t been so sad.
I replied to Prescott with a single thumbs-up emoji. Then I went to my closet, pressed my thumb to the biometric safe hidden behind a wall panel, and removed the prenuptial agreement. The pages were crisp, thick, and cruel. Randolph’s signature slashed across the end in aggressive blue ink. I ran my fingers over it and smiled.