Chapter 65: The Lunch Meetup

On Wednesday morning at Westward & Associates Law Firm in Buckhead, Georgia, Chris Westward was sitting at his massive mahogany desk, flipping through the final draft of a contract for one of his corporate clients when his assistant walked in with an urgent look on her face.

“Sir, there’s ... something you need to see.” She carefully placed a thick envelope on his desk, bearing the official seal of the Fulton County Court.

Chris frowned, setting down his pen and opening the envelope. The moment he saw the bold heading, “Petition for Dissolution of Marriage,” his entire demeanor changed. His grip on the paper tightened, his jaw locking in place. He flipped through the documents, his eyes scanning every detail. His own prenuptial agreement had been thrown back in his face.

The infidelity charges were outlined with damning evidence. The financial restrictions he had placed on Megan were fully documented, and for the settlement demand, Megan was requesting a multimillion-dollar payout, plus ownership of their Buckhead condo and half of their joint assets.

“That bitch,” he muttered under his breath, slamming the papers onto his desk. His assistant stayed silent, shifting uncomfortably as she watched him simmer in anger.

But the anger only lasted a moment. Chris hadn’t built one of the most feared litigation practices in Atlanta by losing his head when he got hit. He had built it by getting hit and then dismantling whoever hit him. He took a slow breath, picked the papers back up, and read them again. This time not as a husband, but as an attorney evaluating an opposing filing.

And as he read, the cold part of his brain started cataloging problems.

This wasn’t Megan’s work. He knew that immediately. Megan didn’t think like this. The Megan he’d married couldn’t have organized a grocery list without his approval, let alone assembled a filing this clean. The financial documentation alone told him everything. Someone had pulled bank statements going back years, cross-referenced the hotel charges against his travel calendar, and built a coercion narrative around his own prenup. That took access. That took time. That took money.

Someone had been funding this for months, and Megan had been quietly gathering ammunition while still living under his roof, smiling at him across the dinner table.

The betrayal of it made his jaw flex, but he pushed it down. Emotion was a liability right now. He needed to think.

“Who’s her lawyer?” he asked, though he already had an idea.

“Karla Silva,” his assistant confirmed.

“Of course it is.” Chris set the papers down slowly.

He knew Karla Silva by reputation. Family law, but the aggressive kind. She specialized in extracting wealthy men from their marriages with as little skin left on them as possible, and she was good. Methodical. The filing in front of him had her fingerprints all over it. No wasted language, no emotional overreach, every claim backed by an exhibit. She wasn’t trying to win sympathy. She was trying to make him untenable to defend.

Chris leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers, and started running the angles the way he would for any client who walked into his office holding a filing like this.

The prenup was the problem. He’d written it himself, and he’d written it tight, but Silva wasn’t attacking its validity. She was attacking its enforceability. The coercion angle was clever. If she could establish that he’d used the prenup as an instrument of control rather than as a good-faith financial agreement, a sympathetic judge could set aside the limiting provisions entirely. The financial-isolation documentation was building exactly that case. She was turning his own contract into evidence of abuse.

So, he couldn’t defend the prenup head-on. That meant he had to undercut the premise. He needed to muddy Megan’s credibility. A woman fleeing an abusive marriage was sympathetic. A woman who’d been carrying on her own affair, who’d planned her exit for months while playing the loyal wife, who had some wealthy outside party bankrolling her divorce? That was a different picture entirely.

That was his move. Not to defend the marriage. To reframe Megan from victim to schemer.

He just needed to know who was funding her. Because whoever it was, that person was the thread he could pull. A jealous boyfriend. A new man. Somebody with money and a motive. If he could put a face to whoever was financing this, he could recast the entire narrative. Suddenly it wasn’t a battered wife escaping a controlling husband. It was a calculated woman and her wealthy lover stripping a successful attorney for everything he had.

A small, humorless smile crossed his face. Megan had made one mistake. She’d hidden her preparation well, but preparation that thorough cost money, and money left a trail. People always thought the affair was the secret worth keeping. They never understood that the money was where you actually got caught.