Chapter 5 - THE PRICE OF A DRESS
Sienna Vale was arrested two days later.
The charge was possession of stolen property and corporate espionage.
She had tried to sell the drive to a competitor,
not realizing it was tracked and encrypted with a secondary kill-switch.
I watched the news report of her being led out of her apartment.
She was still wearing the red dress,
wrinkled and stained,
a pathetic ghost of the woman from the Glass House.
I felt a pang of disgust,
not for her,
but for the man who had used her.
She was a pawn,
just as I had been,
until I decided to play the game.
Nathaniel was nowhere to be found,
rumored to be hiding in a safe house or trying to flee the country.
His assets were frozen,
his accounts seized.
He was a man with nothing left but his pride,
and that was a currency no one would take.
I spent the week at the office,
working twenty-hour days to stabilize the company.
The employees were scared,
the investors anxious.
I met with every team,
explaining the situation and my plan for the future.
I told them the truth:
the road would be hard,
but we would build something that wouldn't collapse.
I received a package at my desk on Friday.
It was the red dress,
returned by the police as evidence.
I looked at it,
the silk still vibrant despite the damage.
I remembered the day I bought it,
the hope I had felt.
I took a pair of scissors and began to cut.
I cut through the seams,
through the silk,
through the initials C.W.
I cut until it was nothing but scraps of red fabric.
I put the scraps in a bin and set them on fire in the courtyard.
As the smoke rose,
I felt the last of the marriage burn away.
The dress was gone,
and the woman who had worn it was dead.
May you like
I was Claire Whitmore,
and I was finally free of the shadows.
