Chapter 10 - The Divorce
Nathaniel's defense attorney, a sharp, expensive litigator named Preston Blackwood who had handled two previous Cole family legal matters with characteristic ruthlessness, requested a meeting three weeks after the arrest, hoping, transparently, to negotiate a quiet settlement that would minimize both the criminal exposure and the divorce proceedings' visibility.
Luca took the meeting alone, at my request, because I had no interest in sitting across a table from anyone representing Nathaniel's interests until absolutely necessary.
"They're offering a settlement," Luca told me afterward, over dinner at a restaurant far from anywhere the Cole family frequented. "A substantial one — considerably more than you're legally entitled to under the prenup, given how heavily that document favors Nathaniel's side. In exchange, they want you to decline to testify in the criminal proceedings and to sign a non-disclosure agreement about the evening's events."
"Absolutely not."
"That's what I told them," Luca said, allowing himself a small, satisfied smile. "I informed Mr. Blackwood that his client's actions were witnessed by sixty people and recorded on multiple devices, that testimony from you was, at this point, essentially a formality the prosecution didn't strictly require, and that no amount of settlement money was going to purchase your silence about something that criminal in nature. I also mentioned, purely as a courtesy, that Gabriel's financial evidence against Richard was independent of anything related to you, and that even if you disappeared from the case entirely, Richard's exposure remained catastrophic."
"How did he take that?"
"About as well as you'd expect from a man being told his client has no leverage."
The divorce proceedings moved forward with the efficiency that comes from one side having no realistic defense. The prenuptial agreement Nathaniel's family had insisted on nine years earlier — designed, I now understood clearly, to protect Cole assets in exactly this scenario — became largely irrelevant once Luca demonstrated that the marriage's dissolution was directly tied to documented criminal conduct, a provision the original document's drafters had apparently never anticipated needing to close.
I walked away from the marriage with a settlement considerably larger than the prenup would have otherwise allowed, full ownership of a small commercial property in the city that had been an anniversary gift years earlier and that Nathaniel's lawyers hadn't thought to contest, and — more importantly than any of the money — complete legal separation from every liability Richard had attempted to attach to my name.
Nathaniel, meanwhile, faced a criminal trial that moved forward on an accelerated timeline given the overwhelming video evidence. His attorney negotiated a plea deal four months later — three years in state prison for felony assault and unlawful restraint, reduced from a much longer potential sentence in exchange for cooperation with the ongoing fraud investigation into his father, cooperation that, I later learned, mostly consisted of confirming details Gabriel and the state's investigators had already independently established.
Richard's case took longer and ended worse. The state's investigation, bolstered by Gabriel's forensic accounting and Matteo's documentation of the municipal bid fraud, resulted in twenty-two felony counts including securities fraud, wire fraud, and bribery of a public contracting official. Cole Construction Group filed for bankruptcy within six months of that birthday party, its assets liquidated to satisfy creditors, its name — a name that had carried genuine weight in the city's construction industry for three generations — reduced to a cautionary tale cited in business school ethics courses.
Margaret, who faced no criminal charges herself but lost virtually everything in the divorce and bankruptcy proceedings that followed, moved into a modest condominium in a suburb she had once described, at a dinner party years earlier, as "adequate for people who need it to be."
Vanessa Hart's own father, Preston Hart, distanced himself from her publicly the moment the municipal fraud investigation named her as a knowing participant in the scheme to influence contract awards through her relationship with Nathaniel. She faced her own charges eventually, related to her role in the fraud, though I stopped following the details of her case once I understood I no longer needed to think about her at all.
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I attended none of the sentencing hearings. My brothers offered to accompany me if I wanted to be there, to see, in person, the final consequences of nine years, but I declined.
"I don't need to watch him lose everything to know I've already won something more important," I told Dominic. "I got my life back. That's enough."
