Did she hate her former husband?

Evelyn paused on the courthouse steps. Rebecca whispered that she didn’t have to answer. Evelyn looked at the cameras. “I did not win forty-eight million dollars today,” she said.

“I won the right to stop explaining why my life belonged to me.”

Then she stepped into the waiting car. Daniel stayed inside the courthouse long after the crowd left.

Chapter 8 — Rooms Without Doors

Lauren ended their engagement two weeks later. She did not leave because Daniel had lost money. She left because the hearing forced her to see something she’d once found attractive in him — his certainty.

She had mistaken it for strength. Now she understood it was the armor of a man terrified of anything he couldn’t rank beneath himself.