Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 295

Chapter 282. What’s Left

CATHERINE

The article that finally undid me wasn’t anything I’d had a hand in. That was the strange, almost unbearable irony of it, after everything I’d carefully orchestrated. And after the piece I’d fed Priya Shah to damage Sedona’s reputation, it was someone else’s reporting that finally, completely, dismantled mine.

Someone had traced the sourcing.

I never found out exactly who. Adaeze Hendricks’s team, possibly, is working through the discovery process for some unrelated motion and stumbling onto something they recognize as worth pursuing further. Or Priya herself, perhaps, deciding the story of her own manipulation was worth more than her relationship with a source who’d clearly only ever used her. I didn’t know. And by the time it mattered, the fact that I didn’t know had become entirely useless and of no consequence.

“Behind the Smear: How Catherine Voss Orchestrated a Media Campaign Against a Custody Battle Survivor.”

It detailed all of it. The article I’d fed Priya was cherry-picked and damaging. The texts to Dante, “checking in” with careful deniability that read, once laid out in sequence by someone with no investment in protecting me, exactly as calculated as they’d actually been. My presence at the practice facility, watching Sedona’s serve with an expression the journalist had apparently gotten second-hand from Maria’s assistant, assessment, recalibration, the unmistakable signs of someone evaluating a threat rather than greeting a colleague.

It painted the full shape of what I had actually done, across months, while a woman fought for custody of her son against a man who had tried to have her partner murdered.

Home wrecker. Bad sportsmanship. The words attached themselves to my name within days, the specific permanence of internet reputation settling over everything I’d built across a decade-long career.

The sponsors left within the week. All of them, this time, not the careful, deniable absence of invitations quietly not arriving, but formal terminations, several of them citing morality clauses I’d never once worried about before, certain my public image was solid enough to never need testing against them.

The invitational committee removed me from the following year’s roster. My agent stopped returning calls with the same speed Sherry once had, the specific abandonment of someone whose continued association had become, overnight, a liability rather than an asset.

I lost the apartment within two months, not seized, nothing so dramatic, simply unaffordable once the sponsorship income disappeared and the appearance fees dried up, and the careful financial architecture I’d built around my circuit career collapsed under the weight of having no career left to architect around.

Alina came to see me before I left Chicago for good.

I hadn’t expected her to. I’d assumed, reasonably, that she’d distance herself the way everyone else had, the specific self-protective instinct that made perfect sense, that I would have recommended to her myself if our positions were reversed.

She came anyway.

I just wanted to see you before you leave for wherever you’re going. I’m not staying long.

“I don’t actually know where that is yet. I haven’t decided.”

“That seems fitting.” Not unkind. Just accurate. We have known long enough to understand ourselves.

“Can I ask you something?” Alina said. “Honestly. I want a real answer. Not whatever version of yourself you usually perform for people.”

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