Chapter 21
Katherine looked at the glittering boxes.
Compensate.
Make it up to her.
Once a heart was dead, what were jewels except ornaments laid on a grave?
After the guard left, she forced herself out of bed.
Lila rushed to stop her, crying. “Mrs. Padilla, where are you going? At least wait until you’re stronger.”
Katherine gently pushed her hand away.
“I can’t wait,” she said hoarsely. “Not a day. Not an hour. Not another second.”
It was the last day of the month.
The day her divorce would be finalized.
Step by step, through pain so fierce it made her vision swim, she left through the estate’s back gate and made her way to the courthouse.
There, she handed over Nicholas’s old written renunciation and received the final, stamped decree.
Katherine Calhoun and Nicholas Padilla, their marriage having come to its end, are hereby dissolved from this day forward. Each shall go his own way, with no further claim on the other.
The paper trembled slightly in her fingers.
She folded it with care and tucked it close to her body.
Then she gave the clerk a second copy.
“Please send this to the Padilla estate,” she said clearly. “Address it to Nicholas Padilla.”
Once it was done, she stepped outside and hired the plainest carriage she could find.
“Where to, ma’am?” the driver asked.
Katherine pulled back the curtain and looked one last time at the city that had held all her love, all her pain, and all her humiliation.
Then she let the curtain fall.
“South Carolina,” she said. “Take me south.”
At that same moment, in a private hot springs resort outside the city, Samantha nestled beside Nicholas and smiled sweetly.
“Good thing you protected me this time,” she said. “Otherwise I would’ve been the one punished.”
She glanced up at him.
“Do you think Katherine hates me now?”