Chapter 8 - The Downfall of a King
Harold couldn't stay away.
He tried to sue me for "emotional distress" a year into the divorce.
He claimed that I had trapped him in a marriage under false pretenses.
Sarah Vance made short work of that.
She produced the Macau files in court,
along with testimony from five different women Harold had cheated with.
The judge threw the case out in ten minutes.
"Mr. Prescott,"
the judge had said,
"You are lucky you aren't being prosecuted for fraud."
"Go home."
But Harold had no home.
The penthouse had been sold to cover his back taxes.
The Prescott name had become a punchline in Miami.
People remembered the auction,
but they remembered it as the moment Harold Prescott destroyed himself.
I heard he tried to start a new business,
selling "success seminars" in hotel basements.
No one came.
The man who had lived for applause was finally in a room full of silence.
One day,
I saw a photo of him in a tabloid.
He was sitting on a park bench,
looking old and tired.
I didn't feel anger.
I didn't even feel pity.
I felt nothing.
He was a shadow of a life I had outgrown.
I realized then that the best revenge isn't a lawsuit or a public shaming.
The best revenge is living a life so full that you forget they even existed.
Owen and I traveled to Europe that summer.
We walked through the streets of Paris and Rome,
free from the weight of expectations.
I stopped tracking every cent in a notebook.
I started writing my thoughts instead.
I wrote about my mother.
I wrote about the Sterlings.
And I wrote about the twenty-dollar wife who had become a queen.
Life was no longer a series of tasks to be completed.
It was a series of moments to be savored.
May you like
And for the first time,
I had plenty of time to savor them.
