Nathan believed himself divorced.
He was not.
Walter’s research proved equally significant.
The original founding documents, signed years earlier when Hawthorne Analytics existed as little more than an ambitious idea, listed Claire as an equal co-founder with fifty percent ownership.
Somewhere along the way, likely during a period when Claire had been too consumed with early motherhood exhaustion to scrutinize every document Nathan placed in front of her, revised paperwork had been filed reducing her stake significantly.
Paperwork, Walter discovered upon closer inspection, that appeared to bear a signature remarkably inconsistent with Claire’s actual handwriting.
“This looks like forgery,” Walter told her during a phone call three weeks after the incident. “I’d stake my reputation on it.”
He sent over side-by-side comparisons of Claire’s actual signature against the one appearing on the revised ownership documents.
The differences, once pointed out, seemed almost embarrassingly obvious.
Claire absorbed that information slowly, methodically, the same way she’d once absorbed every difficult truth about her marriage.
Not with immediate explosive anger, but with the quiet, calculating resolve of someone building a case rather than simply reacting to pain.
Renata filed immediately to nullify the fraudulent ownership documents, restoring Claire’s original fifty percent stake in the company Nathan had spent years claiming entirely as his own creation.
She also filed formal notice regarding the invalid divorce proceedings, ensuring Nathan’s legal team understood clearly that Claire remained his legal wife, regardless of whatever story he’d been telling socially.
Nathan, apparently, never bothered verifying his own legal status before scheduling his next wedding.
Six weeks after the blizzard, invitations went out for Nathan and Isabelle’s wedding, an extravagant affair planned at the Hawthorne estate, a property Nathan had purchased with company funds during the same period he’d been defrauding his actual business.
Claire learned about the wedding through a mutual acquaintance, someone who assumed, given the divorce story circulating, that Claire would have no particular reaction to the news.
She had a very particular reaction indeed.
She spent those six weeks recovering physically, bonding with Ivy, and quietly assembling every piece of evidence Renata, Walter, and Desmond had gathered.
Financial records proving systematic fraud. The forged ownership documents. Photographs and receipts documenting Isabelle’s overlap with the company’s most sensitive growth period. And, crucially, official confirmation that Nathan’s divorce had never been legally finalized.
On the morning of the wedding, Claire made a decision that surprised even herself.
She would attend.
Not through the front entrance, not as an invited guest, but present nonetheless, bearing witness to exactly the kind of consequence Nathan had never imagined possible.
Renata had cautioned against it initially, worried about optics, about how the confrontation might appear to outside observers.
“I understand the risk,” Claire told her. “But I need him to understand exactly what he’s lost, in the exact moment he thinks he’s gaining everything.”
Renata, recognizing the resolve behind that statement, agreed to accompany her, along with the necessary legal documentation.
