PART 3
I did not marry Chloe in three months. Obviously.
But I didn’t just call off the wedding, either, because calling off a wedding doesn’t undo months of psychological abuse against two children, and it doesn’t protect them from a woman who’d already proven she’d manufacture evidence and lie to my face. Chloe had shown me exactly who she was and exactly what she was capable of. I was not going to respond with a polite breakup.
I went to my attorney with the footage.
Because here’s what Chloe never understood about the man she was trying to marry. She saw a distracted, grieving widower, consumed by corporate acquisitions, easy to manipulate over candlelight, too busy to see what was happening in his own home. She thought my distraction was a permanent weakness she could exploit.
She forgot that a man distracted enough to miss the abuse is also a man with the resources to end it completely once he sees it — thirty cameras, a head of security, an attorney on retainer, and the specific, focused fury of a father who has just watched someone terrorize his children.
