My mother-in-law took dinner plates away from my two daughters in front of the entire family

Three weeks later.

The divorce proceedings were filed with a speed that caught the entire Ralston legal team off guard. Of course, they didn't have much of a legal team left, considering I had cut off the funding for Graham’s corporate accounts, leaving him unable to pay his high-priced attorneys.

I sat in the conference room of my legal firm, Vance, Sterling & Associates, on the forty-second floor of a tower overlooking downtown Dallas.

My attorney, Sarah, laid out the terms of the custody agreement.

"Graham is demanding full joint custody and spousal support," Sarah said, tapping her pen against the mahogany table. "He’s claiming that you hid assets during the marriage and that he is entitled to half of Vance Properties."

"Let him claim whatever he wants," I said, looking out the window at the city. "My father set up the corporate structures before Graham and I even met. Everything is held under pre-marital trusts. He doesn't have a claim to a single brick of my buildings."

"And the custody?"

"He can have supervised visitation every other weekend," I said coldly. "But he will never be alone with my daughters. And his mother is never, under any circumstances, to be within five hundred feet of them."

The door to the conference room opened, and Graham walked in. He looked like a shadow of his former self. His bespoke suit was gone, replaced by an off-the-rack jacket that didn't fit his shoulders. The arrogance in his eyes had been replaced by a desperate, hollow exhaustion.