My name is Kiana Bell, and on a cold Tuesday morning in November, I walked into Department 42 of the Superior Court wearing a five-year-old dress and carrying a single yellow legal pad. Everyone in that mahogany-paneled courtroom expected me to cry, sign whatever papers they pushed across the table, and disappear back into the poverty I’d supposedly clawed my way out of when I married Jameson Brooks. My husband certainly expected it.
He laughed out loud when I stood up to represent myself—a rich, throaty sound that bounced off the expensive wood paneling, the kind of laugh that belonged to a man who’d never lost anything in his life. Jameson Brooks leaned back in his Italian leather chair, smoothing the lapel of his three-thousand-dollar charcoal suit, and turned to his attorney Harrison Howard—a man known in legal circles as the Butcher because he left nothing behind when he finished with opposing counsel. “Look at her, Harrison,” Jameson whispered loud enough for half the room to hear.
“She’s wearing that dress I bought her for a charity gala five years ago. It’s pathetic. She thinks she’s in a movie.”
Harrison Howard didn’t laugh.
He was a man with silver hair and eyes like chipped granite, and he only smirked, tapping his gold fountain pen against the heavy oak table. “Let her play pretend. It makes the kill easier.
Judge Coleman hates time-wasters. She’ll be held in contempt before lunch.”
I sat across the aisle at the plaintiff’s table, feeling the blast of cold air from the courthouse ventilation system prickle my skin under the thin fabric. Unlike the defense table—cluttered with paralegals, expensive laptops, and thick stacks of neatly bound exhibits—my table was empty except for that yellow legal pad and a plastic cup of lukewarm water.
I kept my head down, brown hair pulled back in a severe bun. To anyone watching, I looked exactly like what they expected: a defeated woman, a housewife traded in for a newer model. Specifically, Jameson’s twenty-four-year-old personal assistant, Destiny Price.
“All rise,” the bailiff bellowed. Judge Declan Coleman swept into the room, adjusted his glasses, and looked down at the docket with a frown. He was old-school, a jurist with zero patience for theatrics and even less for incompetence.
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