And there it was. The second bombshell. The one I had saved for the very end.
Miriam did not smile. She simply reached into her briefcase, pulled out a heavily redacted, sealed envelope, and placed it on the table.
“Your Honor,” Miriam said, her voice dropping an octave, commanding the absolute attention of every soul in the room. “The respondent has claimed throughout these proceedings that his urgency to finalize this divorce is due to his desire to start a new family with Ms. Kensington. Ms. Kensington has publicly, and in sworn affidavits related to her residency requests, claimed to be pregnant with Mr. Sterling’s child.”
Sloane’s hands flew instinctively to her flat stomach. “I am!” she cried out. “He knows I am!”
“However,” Miriam continued relentlessly, “we have subpoenaed the findings of an internal investigation ordered by Mr. Sterling’s own corporate counsel last month. It appears Mr. Sterling grew suspicious of the financial demands being made upon him.”
Richard whispered, a harsh, desperate sound, “Shut up, Miriam.”
But Miriam’s voice cut through him like a surgical blade.
“The medical records procured by the corporate investigation concluded, definitively, that Ms. Kensington is not, and has never been, pregnant. The ultrasound photos submitted to Mr. Sterling were downloaded from an open-source medical database.”
The silence that followed was absolute. It was a vacuum, sucking the oxygen from the room.
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