"Sign here, here, and here."
That was all he said. Three years of marriage and that was all Damien Cole had for me. No real explanation. No apology. Not even the decency to sit down while he ended everything.
I looked at the folder on the table. I already knew what was inside before I touched it. Something about the way he stood there with his jacket still on and his keys still in his hand told me everything. He hadn't come home tonight. He had come to finish something. And he was doing it with the same cold efficiency he used to close every business deal he ever walked away from.
I opened the folder.
Divorce papers. Fully filled out. His signature already sat at the bottom of every single page, neat and certain, like he had been rehearsing this moment for months. Maybe he had. Damien had stopped letting me into anything about his life a long time ago so I wouldn't know.
"It's better for both of us," he said. "You can keep the apartment."
He said it the way you tell someone a meeting has been moved. No weight. No remorse. Just information being delivered to someone he had already mentally checked out on. I sat there and looked at him. Really looked at him. I searched his face for something. Guilt. Discomfort. Anything human. But Damien was already somewhere else entirely. He had been somewhere else for the better part of three years and I had spent all that time pretending not to notice.
I picked up the pen.
My hand was steady. That surprised me more than anything else about that moment. I had imagined this scene before, in the long quiet hours when he didn't come home and I sat alone eating food I had cooked for two.
In those versions I cried. I asked him what I had done wrong. I asked him if there was anything left to save. But sitting there with the pen in my hand none of that came. What came instead was something quieter. Something that felt like the last door of a house clicking shut behind you.
I signed every page without a single word.
I handed the folder back. He took it and for one brief second something moved across his face. A flicker of something I couldn't name. I decided right then it didn't matter anymore. I reached beside me and picked up my bag. I had packed it that morning, not because I had known the papers were coming but because some part of me had been counting down to this for a while. The bag had been sitting there all day like a quiet admission.
I stood up.
"Elena." His voice came out different when he said my name. Slower. Like he had just noticed something was wrong.
I stopped but I didn't turn around.
"You're not going to say anything?" he asked.
I thought about it. Three years of things I had never said crowded into that moment all at once. Every dinner I ate alone. Every event I attended on his arm while he spent the whole night scanning the room for her. Every time Vivienne Lau's name came up and his entire face changed in a way it never did for me. Every morning I woke up next to a man who had already left before he even opened his eyes.
"You already said everything," I told him. "You said it when you signed your name before you even walked through the door."
I walked out.
The night air outside the building was cool and sharp and I stood on the pavement for a moment just breathing it in. Couples walked past. A cab honked somewhere down the street. The world was completely indifferent to the fact that I had just handed back three years of my life in under five minutes.
I pulled out my phone.
There was a message I had been carrying around since that morning. I had read it so many times the words were already memorized but I opened it again just to feel the weight of it one more time. It was from a private genetics lab. Eight months ago I had submitted a DNA sample through a process so quiet and careful that nobody, not even my best friend Clara, knew about it.
I had done it because of something my mother said once that she tried to immediately walk back. A small comment about how my father used to say I had eyes that didn't belong to either of them. She laughed. I didn't.
The report was thorough and the conclusion was absolute. I was not biologically related to the people who raised me. I had been placed through a private adoption arrangement as an infant. And the biological family name attached to my file stopped me cold the first time I read it.
Shao.
As in Victor Shao. As in Shao Industries. As in one of the most powerful family empires in the entire country.
I put my phone away and looked up at the building one last time. Somewhere up on the fourteenth floor Damien Cole was probably already relieved. Probably already reaching for his phone to call her. Moving into the future he had always wanted, the one where I was never part of the picture.
He had absolutely no idea what picture I was actually part of.
And neither did I yet. Not fully. Because what I didn't know standing on that pavement was that my buried identity and the Cole family were connected in a way that was going to make everything that came next feel like the ground had been pulled from under an entire city.
My phone rang. Unknown number. I stared at the screen for three seconds.
Then I answered.
"Miss Elena Marsh," the voice on the other end said, calm and deliberate. "My name is Victor Shao. I think it's t
ime we met. I've been looking for you for a very long time."