22. Cassie
— ? —
Cassie
The end comes faster than I expected.
Charles’s public meltdown video goes viral overnight. By morning, it has over a hundred thousand views and is being dissected on every gossip site and social media platform in the city. The comments are brutal. The memes are worse. Someone even created a remix of his crying set to sad violin music.
His credibility is destroyed. His reputation is in tatters.
The smear campaign against me has completely backfired.
Now when people talk about the Wallace divorce, they’re not talking about the scheming ex-wife.
They’re talking about the cheating husband who had a breakdown on camera and blamed everyone but himself.
Three days after the video, my lawyer calls with news: Charles has agreed to sign the divorce papers without contesting anything.
He wants this over as quickly and quietly as possible.
His clients are abandoning him in droves.
His social circle has closed ranks against him.
Apparently, nobody wants to be associated with a man who airs his dirty laundry on the internet.
I sign the papers in my lawyer’s office, my hand steady, my heart surprisingly calm. When I write my name on the final page, I feel something shift inside me. A weight I’ve been carrying for months finally lifting from my shoulders.
“Congratulations,” my lawyer says. “You’re officially divorced.”
“Thank you.” I stand up and shake her hand. “For everything.”
I walk out of the office into the afternoon sunshine, blinking at the brightness. It’s a beautiful day. The sort of day that feels like a fresh start, like the universe is offering me a clean slate.
I’m free.
Elliot is waiting for me on the sidewalk, leaning against his car with a bouquet of flowers in his hand. When he sees my face, he breaks into a smile that makes my heart skip.
“It’s done?” he asks.
“It’s done.” I take the flowers and breathe in their scent. “I’m officially a free woman.”
“How do you feel?”
I consider the question seriously. How do I feel? After months of betrayal and scheming and fighting, how do I feel now that it’s actually over?
“Relieved,” I say finally. “And maybe a little sad. I wasted five years of my life on that man. Five years I’ll never get back.”
“You didn’t waste them.” Elliot pulls me close. “You learned from them. You grew from them. You became the woman you are now because of them. That’s not wasted time. That’s a foundation.”
“A foundation for what?”
“For whatever comes next.” He tips my chin up and kisses me, soft and sweet. “For us.”
I melt into the kiss, letting myself feel the joy that’s been fighting to break through all day.
I’m free. Charles is defeated. Celine is gone, having fled the city after Charles’s video made her a pariah.
And I have Elliot, who loves me, who sees me, who makes me feel like the best version of myself.
“What about Celine?” I ask when we break apart. “What happened to her?”
“Finalized this morning, same as yours. The infidelity clause means she walks away with nothing.” Elliot’s expression is satisfied but not cruel. “Last I heard, she’s moving back to her hometown. Apparently, she burned too many bridges to stay anywhere near here.”
“All those threats,” I say. “All that ‘you have no idea what I’m capable of.’ And in the end, she couldn’t touch us.”
“She never could,” Elliot says. “Her only weapon was Charles. The moment he turned on her, she had nothing left to aim.”
“And Charles?”
“His company is struggling. Most of his clients jumped ship after his public meltdowns. He’s not ruined, not completely, but he’s going to spend years digging himself out of the hole he created.” Elliot shrugs. “Karma, I suppose.”
I should feel vindicated. Part of me does. But mostly I just feel... done. Ready to move on. Ready to stop thinking about Charles and Celine and start thinking about the future.
“Can we go somewhere?” I ask. “Somewhere that isn’t here? I want to celebrate, but I also want to be away from all of this. Just for a little while.”
“I know just the place.”
***
He takes me to the coast.
It’s a two-hour drive, and we spend it talking about everything except the divorce. Music and movies and books we want to read. Places we want to travel. The little mundane details of a shared life that I’m only just beginning to imagine.
The house on the beach is modest by Elliot’s standards: just three bedrooms, a wrap-around porch, and an unobstructed view of the ocean. But standing on the deck with the salt wind in my hair and the sound of waves crashing below, I feel like I’ve stepped into another world.
“This was my grandmother’s house,” Elliot says, coming to stand beside me. “She left it to me when she died. I don’t come here often, too many memories, but I thought you might like it.”
“I love it.” I lean against him. “It’s perfect.”
We spend the evening walking on the beach, collecting shells, watching the sunset paint the sky in shades of orange and pink.
We make dinner together in the tiny kitchen, laughing when we can’t find the right pots and pans.
We drink wine on the porch and listen to the waves and don’t talk about Charles or Celine or any of the darkness we’ve left behind.
Later, after we’ve made love in the bedroom overlooking the ocean, Elliot props himself up on one elbow and looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read.
“Cassie,” he says. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“That sounds serious.”
“It is. But it’s also good. At least, I hope you’ll think so.”
I sit up, pulling the sheet around me. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Don’t be nervous.” He takes my hand. “I’ve been thinking about what comes next. For both of us. And I have a proposal.”
“A proposal?”
“Not that kind. Not yet.” He smiles. “A business proposal.”
“I’m listening.”
“You have a gift for people, Cassie. You built relationships at Charles’s company that have lasted even through all this chaos.
Clients who specifically asked for you, who trusted you, who wanted to work with you regardless of what happened with Charles.
” He pauses. “I want you to come work with me. Not as my assistant, not as my girlfriend, but as a partner. I want to create a new division focused on client relations and community engagement, and I want you to run it.”
I stare at him. “You want me to run a division of your company?”
“Your own division. Your own team. Your own budget and strategy and vision.” His eyes are earnest. “You’ve spent years building other people’s empires, Cassie.
It’s time you built your own. You’d be your own boss, answering to no one but yourself.
You’d have complete autonomy over how you run things. ”
“Elliot, I don’t know what to say...”
“Say yes.” He squeezes my hand. “Say yes, and let’s build something together. Something that belongs to both of us. Something that shows the world what you’re capable of when you’re not being held back by someone who doesn’t appreciate you.”
I think about what he’s offering. Not just a job, but a chance to prove myself on my own terms. A chance to take everything I learned from Charles, the good and the bad, and use it to create something better. A chance to be my own person, fully and completely, for the first time in my adult life.
A chance to have my own career, my own success, my own identity separate from anyone else.
“Yes,” I say. “Absolutely yes.”
His smile is brilliant. “Really?”
“Really.” I throw my arms around him. “Thank you. For believing in me. For seeing what I could be instead of what I was.”
“I’ve always seen you, Cassie.” He holds me tight. “From the very first moment you walked into my office, I’ve seen exactly who you are. And she’s magnificent.”
We stay wrapped around each other as the moon rises over the ocean, and I feel something settle into place inside me. Not just happiness, though there’s plenty of that. Something deeper. A sense of purpose. A sense of direction. A sense of finally knowing who I am and what I want.
For years, I was Charles Wallace’s wife. His assistant. His accessory.
Now I’m going to be something else entirely. Someone else entirely. My own woman, with my own career, my own success, my own life.
The thought makes me feel invincible.
“Elliot,” I say quietly.
“Hmm?”
“I have a question for you too.”
“What kind of question?”
I pull back to look at him, my heart pounding with sudden nervousness. “What happens to us now? I mean, I know you love me. I know I love you. But we started this whole thing as a scheme. A revenge plot. What happens when the revenge is over? When there’s nothing left to fight against?”
He’s quiet for a moment, his expression thoughtful. Then he reaches up and cups my face in his hands.
“What happens,” he says slowly, “is that we stop fighting against things and start building toward things. We take all this energy we’ve been putting into revenge and put it into us instead. Into our relationship. Into our future.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It is simple. Not easy, nothing worth having is easy, but simple.” He kisses me softly.
“I love you, Cassie. Not because of Charles or Celine or any of the drama that brought us together. I love you because of who you are. Because you make me laugh and challenge me and refuse to let me get away with my bullshit. That doesn’t change just because the revenge is over. ”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” He pulls me close again. “Now stop worrying and enjoy the moonlight. We have the rest of our lives to figure out the details.”
I settle against his chest and let myself believe him. The rest of our lives. It sounds like a long time. It sounds like exactly what I want.
The waves crash against the shore below, and the moon paints silver paths across the water, and I think: this is what happiness feels like. This is what I was missing all those years with Charles.
And I’ll never go into that kind of relationship again.
But even as I drift toward sleep, one thought keeps circling back: Elliot said “not yet” when I mentioned a proposal. Not yet.
I wonder what he meant by that.