My Composure After Divorce Became His Greatest Torment Chapter 24
Nathan caught up to me at the elevator.
“Elise, wait.”
I held the door-open button but didn’t step out.
He stood on the other side of the threshold, his eyes bloodshot.
“I didn’t know Caroline had the full divorce agreement. I swear, I didn’t know she filed that complaint.”
“But why was she able to?”
Nathan went still.
“Because you gave her access. Your assistant, your driver, the space beside your lawyers. She didn’t seize that power. You handed it to her.”
“When she used that power to dictate the terms of my pregnancy, you told me to apologize to her. It’s only now, when her overreach affects the company, that you finally see it as a problem.”
The elevator began to chime.
Nathan stuck his hand between the doors to stop them from closing, his voice hoarse. “I’ll deal with her.”
“You don’t need to report back to me.”
“The compliance investigation…”
“I requested it as a shareholder.”
I looked at him.
“Nathan, you once said you had to keep making money for me. I don’t need a stock price propped up by concealed risk. How the company deals with this has nothing to do with us.”
His hand slowly dropped.
The elevator doors slid shut between us.
The next day, Prescott Group formed an independent investigation team.
The board required Nathan to temporarily surrender his authority over North American operations while they investigated the extent of Caroline’s access to executive emails, legal files, and company personnel.
The news wasn’t made public.
But Caroline couldn’t sit still.
She leaked a story to a gossip site, claiming I had blackmailed my ex-husband with a confidential file and then terminated my pregnancy after securing a fortune. The article painted me as a calculating gold-digger, even rehashing my father’s bankruptcy.
The link spread while I was at the gallery, setting up lights for a new exhibition.
The artist I was working with started giving me hesitant looks.
Two clients who had booked private viewings canceled.
The online store’s comment section filled with insults.
When Tessa arrived, I was standing in front of a painting, trying to get it to hang straight.
“Don’t read the comments.” She took the phone from my hand. “Look at the evidence.”
She laid three items on the table.
The email I sent the day I found the file.
The notarized record of the file’s return, seal intact.
And the divorce agreements, showing the precise timeline of my settlement.
“They’re betting you’re afraid of the public knowing about the termination, that you won’t dare to fight back.”
I straightened the frame.
“Then they bet wrong.”
“My medical history is not for public debate. My body is not evidence.”
Tessa nodded.
That evening, my lawyer issued a brief statement.
It said nothing about love or heartbreak, nothing about my reasons for the termination.
It simply listed the timeline: discovery of the file, notification, preservation, and return, with redacted records attached.
The final sentence read:
“Ms. Ward has never exchanged any private medical decision for property. Any allegation that treats a woman’s body as a commercial bargaining chip will be met with the full force of the law.”
Three hours later, the website took the article down.
But it wasn’t over.
Tessa showed me the archived submission page from the site’s backend.
Among the attachments Caroline had uploaded were not only my divorce agreements, but also the *Baby Transition Plan* and the postnatal custody draft.
Those documents could only have come from the legal correspondence between our lawyers.
In her desperate attempt to prove I had “maliciously terminated the pregnancy,” Caroline had given the media the very evidence of her own plot to take my child.