“You let yourself go in the process,” he replied coldly.
“That isn’t my problem, Appa.
Your body, your choices, your consequences.
I won’t let them drag my image down.”
Then, with theatrical ease, like unveiling a new product line, he announced his affair, as if infidelity were simply another strategic pivot in his carefully curated executive life.
“I’m seeing someone else,” he said, smoothing his perfectly styled hair and checking his reflection, “someone who understands the demands of my position and upgrades my image instead of destroying it.”
On cue, Chloe appeared in the doorway, his twenty two year old executive assistant, hired eight months earlier despite my unease about the way his gaze had lingered during her interview.
She stood there sleek and smug in a designer dress that probably cost more than my first car, makeup flawless, hair in glossy waves, already wearing a small, triumphant smile.
Mark spoke to me like I was household staff, not his wife.
“We’re leaving for the office together.
My lawyers will handle the settlement.
You can keep the house and yard.
It suits you.”
“I’m tired of the noise, the hormones, the chaos, and the pathetic sight of you shuffling around in milk stained clothes like you’ve given up on life completely,” he added flatly.
He slid his arm possessively around Chloe’s waist, turning his betrayal into a public upgrade, declaring to the world that he had traded in his wife for a newer, shinier model.
The message was brutally clear: my value in his eyes was tied entirely to my physical appeal and usefulness to his image; motherhood had rendered me defective and therefore disposable.
They left together; Chloe’s heels echoed sharply on the marble floor like tiny hammers, while Mark paused only long enough to glance down the hallway where his three sons slept.
The front door closed with a decisive click that seemed to reverberate through the suddenly silent house, sealing off one life and forcing me into another I had not chosen.
Mark believed he had executed a perfect exit, assuming I was too exhausted, emotionally shattered, and financially dependent to fight whatever settlement his lawyers decided to throw my way.
He had underestimated everything about me except my looks—my intelligence, my education, my professional experience, my capacity for strategy and patience, all dismissed as irrelevant background noise.
Before Mark, I had been a promising young writer with a Columbia creative writing degree and two short stories published in respected literary magazines, a woman with her own voice and momentum.
He had called my writing “a cute little hobby” and encouraged me to focus on organizing his corporate events, managing his social calendar, and maintaining the polished facade of Mrs. Mark Vape.
For seven years, I let my creative ambitions wither, trading drafts and workshops for charity galas, networking dinners, client birthday parties, and carefully curated photographs of us at glamorous events.
When the divorce papers landed, something inside me shifted; instead of a death sentence, I saw emancipation, a legal permission slip to reclaim the most powerful weapon I had ever possessed.
The despair, humiliation, and rage Mark intended to crush me with condensed into something cold, sharp, and focused, like molten pain cooling into a blade I could finally wield.
He had stolen my marriage and tried to erase my identity, but he had forgotten the one thing he never really understood: I was a writer before I was his wife.
My life became even more exhausting, yet somehow sharper.
The hours when the babies finally slept, when the house fell quiet and midnight feedings paused, became my sacred windows for writing.
I set my laptop on the kitchen counter between the industrial bottle sterilizer and rows of formula canisters, fingers hovering over the keys while coffee and righteous fury kept my eyes open.
I did not write an essay or memoir begging for sympathy; I wrote a novel, dark and psychologically devastating, called “The CEO’s Scarecrow,” a scalpel aimed directly at Mark’s carefully constructed persona.
I changed names for legal protection—Mark became Victor Stope, Apex Dynamics became Zeith Corporation, Chloe became Clara Bepett—but every physical detail, pattern, and cruelty remained painfully, meticulously accurate.
I described our Mahatta house layout down to the custom Italian marble in the master bathroom, the precise view from our bedroom, the way light fell across his walk in closet.
I documented Victor’s exact whisky blend, his tailor’s name, his obsessive habit of checking his reflection in every reflective surface, and his relentless pursuit of an image polished to unnatural perfection.
I poured the pregnancy, emergency cesarean, postpartum recovery, and brutal discard into the pages, recreating every comment, every sneer, every moment he treated me like damaged packaging instead of a human being.
But I did not stop at personal betrayal; I folded in his casual confessions about cutting regulatory corners, exploiting gray areas, crushing competitors through ethically questionable tactics, and discarding employees once they became “inconvenient.”
All of it went into the novel as Victor’s behavior, shielded by fiction’s label yet rooted in reality with such precision that anyone looking closely could follow the breadcrumbs easily.
Writing was excruciating, like conducting a controlled hemorrhage of seven years’ worth of hurt, submission, and self erasure, turning every wound into sentences that cut more cleanly than his words ever had.
Some chapters I wrote sobbing, others with a cold, surgical detachment, dissecting emotional abuse the way a pathologist dissects a corpse, cataloging each injury with ruthless, clinical precision.
The finished manuscript was not just a story; it was calculated literary justice, a weapon disguised as art, designed to slice through his armor where lawyers never could.
While Mark’s lawyers negotiated custody and assets, assuming I was too depleted to argue, I quietly sent my manuscript to carefully chosen publishers under the pseudonym A.M. Thorpe.
I did not chase a massive advance or a splashy auction; I wanted speed, control, and a publisher who understood the emotional voltage of what I had written.
A respected independent house loved the manuscript’s ferocity and offered an accelerated publication schedule, while my lawyer built multiple legal layers to keep my identity safely obscured.
The book released quietly one Tuesday in early October, sliding into the world without fanfare, gathering a modest but enthusiastic audience among literary fiction readers and critics.
Reviews were glowing; critics called it “a devastatingly precise exploration of corporate misogyny,” “a feminist thriller for the post MeToo era,” and “the most searing portrayal of emotional abuse in recent American fiction.”
See more on the next page
Advertisement
