What came out eventually, through discovery, was that Renata’s fee arrangement with Julian had included a contingency structure.
A significantly larger payout if the settlement exceeded a certain threshold.
An arrangement that, once it surfaced, drew its own scrutiny from the state bar regarding whether family members should be permitted that kind of financial stake in a relative’s divorce outcome at all.
Priscilla filed a formal complaint about the conflict of interest the same week discovery revealed it.
“It probably won’t end her career,” Priscilla told me, matter-of-fact. “It will almost certainly end this particular arrangement, and it puts her name in front of the bar in a way she won’t enjoy.”
I didn’t feel triumphant hearing that, exactly.
Mostly I felt tired.
The specific tiredness of watching a plan built around my own trust and my mother’s careful structuring get picked apart piece by piece by people whose job was simply to notice details.
I should explain, properly, what my mother actually built.
Because none of what happened over the following months makes sense without understanding it.
Delacroix Family Holdings started as a single perfume counter in a department store.
My grandmother’s idea.
Expanded by my mother into a genuine luxury conglomerate over three decades of work most people never saw.
She preferred the company’s public face to stay quiet, understated, entirely about the product rather than the woman behind it.
She was diagnosed with the illness that eventually took her when I was twenty-three.
She spent the following three years, alongside Priscilla, quietly rebuilding the entire trust structure that would eventually pass to me.
Not because she distrusted me.
Because she’d watched, over her own long career, exactly how many wealthy families lost control of what they’d built the moment a marriage went wrong and nobody had planned for it in advance.
“Money without structure is just an invitation,” she told me once, the last spring before she died, sitting in the garden of the house I still live in now. “Build the structure while everyone still loves each other. That’s the only time anyone will actually let you.”
I didn’t fully understand what she meant until I was sitting in Priscilla’s office nine years later.
Watching a forensic timeline lay out exactly how close four months of careful planning had come to succeeding.
The divorce proceedings themselves took just under a year.
Considerably longer than either of us probably wanted.
Though far faster, Priscilla assured me, than they would have gone had Julian’s original plan actually worked.
Under Colorado law, and under the specific protections my mother’s trust had built decades earlier, the vast majority of what I controlled was cleanly established as separate property.
Assets acquired before the marriage.
Held in a trust structure that predated Julian by years.
Appreciation that, once the reappraisal maneuver was formally exposed and blocked, never had the chance to blur into anything resembling marital property at all.
Julian’s attorneys — Renata quietly replaced, three months in, by a firm with no family connection to either of us — ultimately negotiated a settlement covering the marital home we’d purchased together outside the trust structure.
And a modest division of assets we’d genuinely built jointly during the marriage itself.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a fair outcome for nine years of marriage.
It was nowhere close to what four months of careful planning had been engineered to extract.
We met once more after the settlement finalized.
At Priscilla’s insistence.
