Chapter 4
May 30, 2025
Celene’s POV…
I promised myself I’d hand it over in person. Not for closure, not for dignity. Just to show them I wasn’t running, I was returning finished.
I stood in the Carrington foyer one last time, envelope in hand. No bow, no note this time, just signed divorce papers sealed inside and the weight of three wasted years. I placed it gently on the entry table like it wasn’t the burial site of their perfect narrative.
Vivian was the first to appear, gliding past the stairs in a pearl-covered robe that probably cost more than the car I learned to drive in.
“She’s nothing,” she said, loud enough to carry through the house. “Let her go. Good riddance.”
I didn’t flinch. But God, it still burned. Arielle didn’t bother pretending. She was sprawled on the couch, legs crossed, phone in one hand, iced coffee in the other.
“Send me a postcard from wherever discarded wives end up,” she said with a smirk.
I stood in the foyer and looked around. The art I was never allowed to touch, the family photos I was never invited to be in, the piano I wasn’t good enough to play. I took them all in, one by one. Memorizing the rooms that once swallowed me whole. Not for nostalgia, but to remember the battlefield I’d been crawling across while they smiled for the cameras.
My eyes landed on Vivian again. The woman who once leaned in and told me, “Don’t smile so big. You’re not the face of this family.”
She’d always lower her voice when people asked how we met. Never once called me her daughter-in-law. Just her.
Then there was Arielle. She laughed when I spilled red wine on her silk runner. Corrected me in front of Rhys’s friends like it was a game. Called me desperate for trying to plan his birthday dinner.
And Rhys? He was upstairs now. Standing on the landing, hands in his pockets, jaw tight. Watching. Saying nothing. Moving even less. Typical.
I let myself look at him. Just once. The man I spent years trying to please. The man I used to believe would fight for me. He looked at me like I was something he had to scrape off the bottom of his success. And for a second? It almost broke me.
But instead… I smiled.Not the soft kind. Not the kind that pleads for peace. No. This was the kind of smile that makes a promise without saying a word. The kind that says: you will crawl for what you’ve done.
His eyes shifted. Just barely.
Good.
I turned toward the front door, set the envelope on their coffee table, and walked out.
My heels echoed against the floor like a warning shot.
Click. Click. Click.
A black car waited in the circular drive. Not an Uber. Not hired.
This one belonged to someone who never forgot about me.
I opened the door myself. No hesitation.
The driver glanced back through the rearview mirror as I slid in.
“Your father’s waiting, Ms. Monroe.”
There it was.
The name I was trained to bury.
The name they never knew.
The name they should’ve feared.
I didn’t answer. Just looked out the tinted window as the car pulled away—and smiled again.
Let them whisper. Let them pretend they won.
Because when I come back?
It won’t be to collect my things.
It’ll be to take the throne.
