Chapter 3 - The Cold Truth of Three Years
The room was no larger than the walk-in closet in Victor’s downtown penthouse. A single mattress sat on the floor, covered in thin blankets. In the corner, three plastic buckets were already half-filled with rainwater dripping from a dark stain on the ceiling. On a small wooden crate sat a single pot, a half-empty box of generic rice, and a collection of colored paper stars glued to the cracked plaster above the bed.
Victor stepped inside, the luxury of his world completely fading against the stark reality of his wife's poverty. He set Annie down on the mattress, where she immediately curled up, exhausted from the evening's trauma, and closed her eyes.
"You’re here," Catherine said, her voice turning from shock to a hard, defensive edge. She stood between Victor and the bed, her shoulders square despite her trembling frame. "Why are you here, Victor? Did your mother send you to take her away completely? Is the room too small for your family standards? Did you come to finish the job?"
"Catherine, look at me," Victor pleaded, taking a step forward, his hands raised in surrender. "Please. I didn't know. I swear to Almighty God, I didn't know any of it."
Catherine let out a sharp, bitter laugh that sounded like tearing paper. "You didn't know? You signed the eviction notice, Victor! You signed the restraining order that your mother’s lawyers handed to me at the bus station! You stopped answering my calls! When I managed to get through to your secretary, she told me that Mr. Williams had moved on and that any further attempts to contact him would result in criminal harassment charges!"
"It was her," Victor said, the words choking him. "It was all Maris. She forged your divorce papers, Catherine. She forged the letter you supposedly left on my desk. She’s been intercepting my corporate emails, my personal mail... everything. For three years, I’ve been transferring fifty thousand dollars a month into an account I thought you were using to take care of Annie. I thought you had left me for someone else because that’s the lie she fed me while I was away in Tokyo."
Catherine froze, her eyes scanning Victor’s face with a desperate, analytical intensity. For three years, she had lived with the belief that the man she loved had turned into a cold, corporate monster who had discarded his family for the sake of his mother’s social ambitions. But as she looked at the genuine horror and grief in his eyes—and the rain-soaked wool jacket he had used to protect their daughter—the wall of ice she had built around her heart began to crack.
"Fifty thousand dollars?" she whispered, her voice cracking. "Victor... we haven't had fifty pesos some days. I’ve been working sixteen-hour shifts washing dishes at a diner down the street just to pay the rent on this room. Annie hasn't been to a real school in two years. I’ve been teaching her from old books I find in the public bins."
Victor fell to his knees on the cold linoleum, his head dropping into his hands as the full weight of his mother’s cruelty crushed him. "I am so sorry, Catherine. I was so blind. I was so angry that you had 'left' me that I let my mother handle everything because I couldn't bear to look at the papers. I let her run my life because I thought she was the only one who stayed."
Catherine looked down at him, the billionaire developer kneeling on her broken floor, weeping into his hands. The anger that had sustained her through three years of starvation and concrete cold suddenly dissolved, leaving behind only the profound, shared grief of a family that had been torn apart by a monster wearing pearls.
She sat down on the floor beside him, her hand hesitant before she finally placed it on his trembling shoulder.
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"She told me you were going to lose the inheritance if I stayed," Catherine said quietly, the rain clicking against the windowpane. "She said your father’s will had a clause that allowed her to strip you of the Williams Group CEO position if you married someone from 'outside the circle' without her written consent. She said she would ruin you, Victor. I left because I didn't want to be the reason you lost everything your father built."
Victor raised his head, his eyes burning with a dark, unshakeable resolve. "My father didn't build this company for her to use as a weapon, Catherine. And as of tonight, she doesn't have a son anymore. Tomorrow morning, the Williams Group is going to experience a reckoning."
