Chapter 10 - Happily Never After for the CruelFar across town, in a modest two-bedroom apartment in Queens—a stark contrast to the Hamptons estate she had been forced to vacate—Brooke Whitaker sat at a small kitchen table surrounded by half-unpacked moving boxes.
Her phone buzzed continuously on the counter, notifications flashing from social media accounts, gossip blogs, and financial news networks detailing the complete dismantling of the Whitaker-Ellison scandal.
Every single friend she had brunch with, every high-society woman who had sipped champagne at Verelle while mocking Claire’s faded denim jacket, had suddenly stopped returning her calls. In the ruthless hierarchy of New York wealth, failure was contagious, and Brooke had just caught the worst case of it in a decade.
She picked up her phone, her hands shaking with leftover rage and humiliation, intending to scroll through Instagram just to escape her reality.
The very first post on her feed was a high-resolution photo published by a major fashion magazine.
It showed Claire and Nathan walking hand-in-hand down Madison Avenue, laughing together beneath the afternoon sun. Claire was wearing the cream-colored cashmere coat from Verelle—the one Brooke had sworn she could never afford in a million lifetimes.
Beneath the photo, the headline read: The Queen of Wall Street: How Claire Whitaker Conquered New York.
Brooke let out a bitter, choked sob, slamming her phone down onto the table so hard the screen cracked right down the middle.
May you like
She had tried to teach Claire a lesson about how the world treated people without money.
Instead, Claire had taught the entire city of New York a much more permanent lesson: never underestimate a woman who has already lost everything, because she has nothing left to fear—and everything left to conquer.
