Chapter 6 - THE SHATTERED MIRROR
The luxury apartment on the Upper East Side that Derek and Vanessa had shared was liquidated by court order three weeks later.
I stood in the center of the empty living room, the white leather sofas and the crystal chandeliers gone, leaving nothing but bare walls and the quiet sound of the city traffic below.
Vanessa stood near the doorway, her designer clothes gone, her hands trembling as she clutched a cardboard box containing her remaining personal items.
"Are you happy now, Evelyn?" she whispered, her voice cracking with a raw, bitter hatred that had been stripped of all high-society pretense.
"You took everything from us."
"You took his job, you took our home, and you put the man I love behind bars for the rest of his youth."
"I didn't take anything from you, Vanessa," I said, my voice completely flat and steady as I walked toward the exit.
"Derek took your future the moment he decided that my son’s life was an excuse for his own failures."
"You simply helped him carry the weight of that choice."
"And as for the apartment—the funds from this sale are going directly into a secure medical trust for the children whose parents were defrauded by his firm."
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I walked past her without looking back, my boots clicking sharply against the bare wood floorboards like a clean, final sentence.
The mirror they had used to project their perfect, wealthy success had been permanently shattered, and the shards were too small to ever be glued back together.
