Richard’s attorney, Thorne, was aggressively packing his briefcase, refusing to look at his client, looking for all the world like a man trying to escape a sinking ship.
As Miriam and I walked out of the courtroom, the heavy double doors opening into the chaotic hallway, a swarm of reporters surged against the velvet barricades. Flashes blinded me.
Someone shoved a microphone forward and shouted, “Mrs. Sterling! Did you know you were going to win today?”
I stopped. I looked at the cameras, and then I looked down at my stomach.
“I didn’t know if I would win,” I answered clearly. “I just knew my child deserved much more than his father’s contempt.”
Three months later, I sat in the pale, sun-drenched nursery of the Tribeca penthouse—the very penthouse Richard had once told me I had “no claim to.” I held my son, Edmund James Sterling, against my chest. He was warm, sleeping soundly, completely unaware of the empire resting on his tiny shoulders.
The city below looked less like a battlefield and more like a blank canvas.
The fallout had been swift and merciless. Sterling Capital’s board of directors, terrified by the sheer volume of the fraud I had uncovered, voted Richard out unanimously. The federal investigation into his misuse of corporate funds became front-page news for weeks.
Eleanor Sterling resigned from her position on the family foundation board and retreated to her estate in the Hamptons, refusing to speak to the press. Sloane Kensington sold her story to a tabloid, but when her contradictory lies about the fake pregnancy were exposed, she vanished from the social scene entirely, leaving behind a trail of unpaid luxury invoices.
Richard had sent me exactly one text message the day the board officially removed him.
You destroyed me.
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