The first sign came quietly.
A polite email from the credit card company:
Payment Overdue — Please Contact Customer Service
Serena deleted it without reading the full message.
Mistakes happened.
Oversights.
Nothing she couldn't fix.
The second came less politely.
A call from the penthouse management office.
"Ms. Calvert, we've noticed a delay in the monthly maintenance fee."
Polite.
Professional.
But undercut with the kind of careful tone reserved for people who might soon stop belonging.
Serena assured them it would be handled.
Her voice was steady.
Her hands shook.
She turned to Landon that evening,
leaning in the doorway while he rummaged through the fridge.
"We need to talk about finances."
He didn't even glance at her.
"Talk to your accountant," he said, voice muffled behind the fridge door.
"Not my problem."
Serena flinched.
Not my problem.
Later that night, she checked the accounts Malik had once set up for their joint use.
Closed.
Frozen.
Transferred.
All of it gone.
Only the gallery's leftovers remained —
and the gallery barely functioned without Malik's silent backing.
Her personal savings had been eroded faster than she realized —
between the luxury life Landon insisted on maintaining
and her desperate attempts to still appear "unchanged" to the outside world.
Pride didn't pay for penthouses.
Or maintenance fees.
Or food.
And Landon —
once so eager to be by her side —
now spent more nights away than home.
He stopped pretending.
Didn't even bother lying anymore.
When he came home drunk at 3 a.m.,
he stumbled through the living room without so much as a hello,
reeking of cheap perfume and bad decisions.
Serena watched from the shadows of the hallway,
arms crossed tightly against her chest.
She didn't cry.
There were no tears left.
Only a growing numbness.
The next morning, she tried one last time.
Tried to ask.
Tried to hold onto something.
"Can we just—talk?" she said quietly over coffee.
Landon laughed without humor.
"Talk about what?
How broke you are?
How pathetic this is?"
He pushed back from the table, smirking.
"You think just because you were Mrs. Graves, the world owes you something?"
The words hit harder because they were true in ways she hadn't wanted to admit.
He left again.
No kiss.
No goodbye.
Not even a glance.
Serena sat alone in the penthouse,
surrounded by glass and steel and silence.
A queen without a crown.
A survivor with nothing left to survive for.
Outside, the city kept breathing.
Inside, Serena counted every shallow breath she took.
Wondering if one day,
soon,
even breathing would be too expensive to afford.