Veronica nodded at the paper.
“Already signed on my part. Tonight was not about saving your deal, Arthur. It was about reclaiming what belongs to me: my voice, my life. I’ll see you in court.”
She turned and walked down the corridor towards the elevators, hearing Karina’s scream and her husband’s indistinct muttering behind her. But she didn’t look back, because there was nothing to look back at. Her past was there, and she was walking into the future.
Outside, a blizzard was raging, and the frosty air—minus 25, at least—burned her face when she got into a taxi and asked the driver to open the window. The cold seeped through the thin cashmere of her dress, but it wasn’t cold. It was freedom.
The next morning, Arthur burst into the mansion as Veronica was packing her last things into a suitcase. Without a jacket, without a tie, with the wild eyes of a man who had lost everything he believed in overnight.
“Veronica!” He fell to his knees right on the bedroom threshold, grabbed her legs, pressed his face to the hem of her robe. “Forgive me! Stay! I’ll fix everything, I swear!”
She looked down at him, at this man who for ten years had called her a chicken, a country bumpkin, a shopgirl from the sticks, and felt nothing but exhaustion.
“I’ll make you vice president of the company!” He clung to her knees. “I’ll fire Karina today! I’ll buy you anything you want! We’ll go to Paris, to Milan, wherever you say!”
“Schmidt offered me a job with an annual salary of two hundred thousand dollars,” Veronica gently freed herself from his grasp. “Bonuses. Plus an apartment in Berlin. I don’t need your handouts.”
Arthur rose from his knees, and his face changed. Pleading was replaced by anger, despair, the familiar contempt.
“Fine, leave!” He straightened up, squared his shoulders, trying to reclaim the last remnants of his dignity. “But you won’t take anything from this house. This is my house. I built it.”
Veronica opened her bag, took out a document folded in four with an official seal, and unfolded it in front of her husband’s face.
“Certificate of ownership. Owner – Veronica Polyakova. Date of registration – 2012. Two years before our wedding.”
Arthur snatched the paper from her hands. He stared at the lines, read them once, twice, a third time, and slowly sank onto the edge of the bed, because his legs refused to hold him.
“I bought this house with my own savings.” Veronica took the document back and put it in her bag. “I earned enough in three years as a simultaneous interpreter. I let you live here to save you face: you were so proud of your mansion in front of your partners. You have one week, Arthur. Pack your things and move out. Otherwise, it’s bailiffs and the police.”
She left the bedroom with her suitcase and in the living room came across Karina, who was standing in the middle of the room with the air of a mistress, arms crossed and chin jutting forward.
“You’re not going anywhere!” Karina jutted her chin even higher. “You think you’re the smartest one here? Arthur will deal with your forgeries in no time. You’ll be jailed for slander!”
Veronica put down the suitcase, opened her bag, and threw a folder of documents on the coffee table, a hefty one, bulging with papers.
“Here’s your correspondence with Arthur about spying on me.” She listed calmly, bending her fingers. “‘She went to the library again, suspicious.’ Photos of your meetings with a representative of a competing company. Statements of embezzlement. Business trips to Milan that never happened. Purchases at the central department store, written off as business expenses. And the last document—the results of a DNA test.”
Karina turned pale.
“You’re pregnant, Karina. Congratulations. But Arthur is not the father. He was on a business trip in Munich at the time of conception. I checked his tickets.”
Arthur, who had appeared in the living room doorway, snatched the folder from Veronica’s hands and began to frantically flip through the pages. His face changed: from disbelief to fury, from fury to something like hatred, now directed not at his wife.
“Is this true?”
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