Chapter 4 - The Emergency ConferenceThe conference room on the 42nd floor of Mercer & Associates smelled of expensive mahogany, cold coffee, and pure, unfiltered panic.
Marcus, Daniel’s lead divorce attorney, rubbed his temples as he stared at the printed settlement agreement spread across the glass table. Across from him sat Daniel, looking like a man who hadn't slept in forty-eight hours, his shirt collar stained with sweat.
"Let me get this straight," Marcus said, his voice dangerously calm. "You drafted a clause explicitly waiving all rights to her artwork, valued it at one dollar to make a petty point, and now that the collection has sold for forty-eight million dollars, you want me to convince a judge that you were the victim of a clever trap?"
"It was a trap!" Daniel slammed his fist against the glass table, making the water glasses rattle. "She knew! She must have known Vance was circling her work for months! She concealed material financial upside during mediation!"
"Did you ask for an appraisal?" Marcus asked bluntly.
Daniel stopped. "What?"
"Did you, during the discovery phase of this divorce, request a formal, professional appraisal of the artwork stacked in your attic?" Marcus leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. "Because according to your own deposition, Daniel, you swore under oath that the artwork had no commercial value, zero market demand, and constituted mere domestic clutter. You didn't want an appraisal because you didn't want to pay expert fees for a pile of garbage."
Daniel opened his mouth, but no words came out.
"If you didn't appraise it, and you voluntarily signed a release assigning 100% of the intellectual property and physical inventory to her for a nominal fee of one dollar..." Marcus sighed, leaning back in his chair. "The judge is going to laugh us out of the courtroom. In fact, the New York Bar association might investigate me for letting you sign such an idiotically negligent clause."
The door to the conference room swung open.
Lauren walked in. She wasn't wearing her usual polished, professional smile. Her expression was hard, her eyes like chips of flint. She slammed a tablet down onto the glass table, sliding it toward Daniel.
"Read it," she said flatly.
Daniel looked down at the screen. It was an open letter published by the New York Art Review, written by Julian Vance himself.
“The emergence of Evelyn Cross is not an accident of the market,” the article read. “It is a testament to what happens when an artist is forced to endure decades of institutionalized blindness within their own home. Her work speaks of cages, of invisible walls, and of the hollow men who decorate their lives with trophies while starving the true creators beneath their feet. We are proud to announce that her entire collection has been acquired by the Sterling-Vane Foundation, and her upcoming solo retrospective, titled ‘The Price of a Dollar,’ will open next month.”
Daniel felt the room spin.
The Price of a Dollar.
The title was a direct, public execution. Everyone in the Manhattan art world—every judge, every CEO, every high-society client Daniel had spent twenty years cultivating—would read that title and immediately understand the joke.
"She's destroying me," Daniel whispered, staring at the screen. "She’s going to humiliate me in front of the entire city."
"She’s not just humiliating you," Lauren said, her voice dripping with venom. "She’s cutting you out of my life, too. My gallery just pulled out of our corporate sponsorship talks. Do you know why? Because nobody wants to be associated with a man who legally valued a multi-million-dollar genius at one hundred cents."
Daniel looked up, shock flashing across his face. "Lauren... wait. We’re getting married as soon as the decree goes through. We talked about this—"
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"We talked about a partnership based on power and status, Daniel," Lauren interrupted, grabbing her handbag from the back of the chair. "Not a public laughingstock. Call me when you figure out how to salvage your dignity—if there's any left to save."
She turned on her heel and walked out, the click of her heels echoing like a death knell down the corridor.
