Part 4 — When my husband’s pregnant mistress applied using my address and insurance, her call suddenly made Alistair go pale

After Evelyn’s words, the air in the room seemed to run out.

Alistair stood by the window and looked at the black car below.

“Did you do this?” he asked me.

“I have not filed a single complaint yet.”

“Then who?”

Evelyn put the phone into her bag.

“The police are in the foundation’s accounting office. It is better that no one act rashly now.”

Alistair immediately called his father.

“Dad, there are police at the office… No, it’s not connected to Chloe… I don’t know who filed the complaint.”

He listened for several seconds.

Then the phone slowly fell from his hand.

“Dad told me that the foundation board suspended all my financial powers.”

“Only temporarily?” I asked.

“Until the investigation is finished.”

Evelyn nodded.

“This is standard procedure.”

Alistair looked at her.

“You were my family’s lawyer.”

“I was,” she answered. “From this moment, I represent only Vivian.”

It was the first door that closed in his face.

Chloe called once again.

Alistair answered.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“With your wife, as always,” Chloe’s voice came through. “If you want the child not to remain without a name, come onto the stage and announce everything.”

“Chloe, stop.”

“No. You told me Vivian would soon no longer matter.”

Alistair froze.

His eyes reached me.

Chloe continued, not realizing that the call was on speaker.

“You said her house would become ours. You said you would settle everything with the foundation’s money. You said she was unnecessary in your new life.”

Alistair closed his eyes.

His own words rang out in the room.

Not my interpretation. Not suspicion. Not his denial.

His voice.

His promises.

Evelyn recorded the conversation and placed the phone on the table.

“This recording can legally be used, because the call came to my device and I am a participant,” she said.

Chloe fell silent.

For the first time, fear appeared in her voice.

“Vivian…” she said.

“Now you have nothing left to say to me.”

“The child is still his child.”

“Perhaps. But the child is not your right to my house, my money, or my name.”

“Alistair loves me.”

Alistair raised his head.

“Chloe, hang up.”

“You yourself told me that you loved me!”

“And now I understand what I was doing.”

The call ended.

Alistair sat down on the chair. For the first time I saw him not as the Stanford heir, but as a man who had repeated his own lies so many times that in the end he himself believed them.

The gala did not take place that evening.

Letters were sent to the guests, the musicians packed up their instruments, and the foundation board scheduled an emergency meeting.

The next morning the police took accounting computers from Alistair’s office.

No charges were immediately brought against Chloe, because her involvement was still being investigated. But the financial records were clear: the money transferred to the maternity center had left the foundation, while the address change had been carried out from my account.

Alistair insisted that he knew nothing.

Then the investigators made him listen to his own voice.

“You said the house would become ours,” Chloe’s voice rang out.

Alistair lowered his head.

“I said that,” he whispered.

“Yes,” the investigator replied. “You did.”

At the end of that day, Alistair’s lawyer refused to defend him until a new financial report was prepared.

When I returned home, the bedroom was empty.

He had taken his clothes. The watch was no longer beside the bed. Only the frame of our wedding photograph remained on the dresser, slightly tilted, as if he had brushed against it while leaving.

A small reflection of my copper compass was visible behind the photograph.

I had attached it to my scarf on the day when I first entered this house as his wife. Then I thought I had already found my direction.

Now I picked up the compass.

It still pointed in the same direction.

But this time I no longer needed to follow anyone.

Three weeks later, the foundation board fully restored my authority. The investigation confirmed that Alistair had been hiding the illegal use of funds and had used several transfers for personal expenses.

The court imposed a freeze on his assets until the case was completed.

And the penthouse, as Evelyn had discovered from the beginning, was entirely mine. I had bought it before the marriage, and it had never entered the family property list.

The question of Chloe’s child’s paternity was confirmed separately by a genetic test.

The child really was Alistair’s.

This truth was neither a victory nor a defeat for me.

A small human being had done nothing wrong for the lies in which adults had wrapped him.

I asked only one thing of Alistair: that he be a responsible father for the child, even if he was no longer a husband to me.

Months later, on the first cold morning of autumn, I left the foundation’s new office. The city smelled of rain. I held a folder in one hand, and with the other I held little Luka’s hand—my sister’s son, whom I was supposed to take to school for the first time that week.

“Aunt Vivian, what is this?” he asked about the small compass attached to my scarf.

“It is a compass.”

“What does it do?”

“When you get lost, it shows you the direction.”

Luka looked at it seriously.

“And what if you do not like the direction?”

I smiled.

“Then you choose another path.”

That same evening Alistair wrote to me.

“I want to talk to you. I understand everything now. Can we start over?”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Earlier, I would have cried all night over such a message, written a reply, deleted it, and written it again.

Now I sent him only one sentence.

“Our life is not starting over. Mine is already continuing.”

Then I turned off the phone.

I went to the window. The city lights spread across the wet streets. I took the compass off my scarf and placed it on the desk.

Its needle slowly came to a stop.

This time, I was choosing the right direction myself.