Chapter 5 - JosephineThe divorce took four months. It was not dramatic, in the end — Phoebe made sure of that. Desmond kept his operational title, stripped of unilateral authority. Priya's son received a modest, clearly delineated trust of his own, entirely separate from Josephine's, exactly the way Desmond had originally proposed doing to my daughter, except now it was his son on the outside of the primary line, not mine.
Josephine carries the Ashworth name. Not because Desmond fought for it — he didn't, not once he understood what fighting for it would actually cost him — but because I decided, quietly, that my daughter would never spend one single day of her life believing her name had been a gift from anyone but the person who had built the foundation it stood on.
She's eight months old now. She has my eyes and, unfortunately, my stubbornness, according to my mother, who says it with more pride than she probably intends.
Desmond sees her twice a month, supervised, per the custody arrangement. He is, by every account I hear secondhand, trying. I don't know if trying eleven months too late means anything close to enough. I've stopped needing it to.
What I know is this: he stood in a delivery room and told me, while I was fighting to bring our daughter into the world, that she would not be enough to carry his name.
He was wrong about that. And he was wrong about something else, too — that the empire he thought he controlled had ever actually been his to give away in the first place.
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I built the door. I decided when to open it.
And I decided, in the end, that it would open onto a life that belonged entirely to my daughter and me — not because I took it from him, but because it had been mine to give her all along.
