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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I was thirty-four weeks pregnant when I found the black leather notebook.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t snooping.<\/p>\n
I was preparing my hospital bag in our Manhattan penthouse and reached into the back of Flynn Vance\u2019s travel cabinet to find my passport.<\/p>\n
Instead, my hand touched a diary wrapped inside one of his expensive dress shirts.<\/p>\n
Flynn was the CEO of Vance Global, the kind of man business magazines described as brilliant, ruthless, and untouchable.<\/p>\n
At home, however, he had another favorite word.<\/p>\n
Emotional.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u201cPregnancy has made you dramatic, Mabel.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said it often enough that I had almost started believing him.<\/p>\n
Then I opened the diary.<\/p>\n
The first photograph showed Flynn kissing a beautiful blonde woman beside Lake Como.<\/p>\n
The date printed beneath it was three months after our wedding.<\/p>\n
Her name was Selina Cole.<\/p>\n
His first love.<\/p>\n
More photographs followed.<\/p>\n
Paris.<\/p>\n
London.<\/p>\n
Aspen.<\/p>\n
Trips Flynn had told me were for business.<\/p>\n
Then I reached the handwritten pages.<\/p>\n
Mabel is useful. Stable family. Good image for investors.<\/i><\/p>\n
My fingers went cold.<\/p>\n
I turned another page.<\/p>\n
Once the merger closes, Selina and I can stop hiding.<\/i><\/p>\n
Then I found the sentence that changed everything.<\/p>\n
Mabel\u2019s pregnancy complicates things, but she\u2019ll never leave. She has nowhere to go without me.<\/i><\/p>\n
I sat completely still.<\/p>\n
Flynn had made one enormous mistake.<\/p>\n
He had never bothered to understand who I was before becoming his wife.<\/p>\n
Whenever someone asked about my career, he casually told them I had \u201cworked in finance.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was technically true.<\/p>\n
But incomplete.<\/p>\n
Before marrying Flynn, I had spent nine years structuring acquisitions and protecting wealthy family offices during complicated corporate disputes.<\/p>\n
And there was something else Flynn had conveniently forgotten.<\/p>\n
The Manhattan penthouse he liked to call his?<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Several important voting shares that helped keep him in control of Vance Global?<\/p>\n
Those weren\u2019t his either.<\/p>\n
They belonged to a trust created by my late grandfather.<\/p>\n
A trust I controlled.<\/p>\n
Flynn had simply assumed that marrying me meant eventually owning everything connected to me.<\/p>\n
At 9:14 that evening, my phone buzzed.<\/p>\n
A message from him.<\/p>\n
Board dinner. Don\u2019t wait up.<\/i><\/p>\n
I stared at the screen.<\/p>\n
Then I photographed every page of the diary.<\/p>\n
Every picture.<\/p>\n
Every note.<\/p>\n
Every date.<\/p>\n
After that, I called my attorney.<\/p>\n
\u201cPhoebe?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMabel? Is everything okay?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI need you to activate the emergency provisions tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Silence.<\/p>\n
Then:<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of them?\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked down at Flynn\u2019s diary.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
At eleven that night, I packed one suitcase, my maternity bag, and the notebook.<\/p>\n
PART 1 I was thirty-four weeks pregnant when I found the black leather notebook. I wasn\u2019t snooping. I was preparing … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-amomama-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5874,"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5870\/revisions\/5874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amomama.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}