Chapter 5
When I got home, I took inventory of Mom’s things.
She’d loved all kinds of gemstones and used to laugh and tell me they’d be part of my dowry someday.
Now they all lay in the jewelry box like they’d been ransacked by thieves.
After checking everything, I realized a lot of valuable pieces were missing.
I laughed coldly to myself, filed a police report, then contacted the insurance company that covered Mom’s estate.
If Lincoln wanted to play games with me, he shouldn’t blame me for disowning him as a father.
Soon after, my bestie called.
“Zara, check your phone!”
“Your video’s trending.”
My heart sank. Sure enough, the livestream replay was all over social media.
Turns out that male coworker was already a micro-influencer with over 100K followers, and today’s explosive livestream had drawn a huge crowd.
Now my half-naked image was being used as clickbait.
The caption read “BEATING THE HOMEWRECKER” in bright red letters.
The comments were vile and disgusting.
“Sure, cheating men are part of the problem, but look how slutty she is-she definitely seduced someone’s husband.”
“Those earrings she’s wearing cost like 200K. No way a young girl could afford that herself. This gold digger had the nerve to flaunt it in front of the real wife-she deserved that beating!”
“People in the livestream chat said they’d seen her at clubs. Bet we’ll see her porn videos online soon.”
The malicious comments made me want to puke.
For news about a corporate heiress to stay trending this long, Dad must have been pulling strings behind the scenes.
It broke my heart.
I knew he’d always resented being a gold digger, but honestly, our family had never mistreated him.
He was a college kid from the mountains. Mom paid for his education and got him a job at our company.
Even after Mom died, the family gave him 10% of the shares to help manage the company for me while I was still young.
A man who’d built his life by sucking our family dry was now turning on us.
Too bad Grandma was vacationing abroad and wouldn’t be back until tonight. He could keep his little power trip going for a few
more hours.
After getting my thoughts together, I was surprised to get a call from my boyfriend.
Chapter!
I hadn’t told him about the past few days, but he immediately started screaming at me:
“Zara Rodriguez, I knew you were shameless!”
“Getting into catfights with your stepmom, hooking up with your own dad-you’re disgusting.”
I opened my mouth, but the words got stuck in my throat.
My boyfriend sneered:
“Now I get why you didn’t want your dad to find a stepmom. You’ve got daddy issues-that’s sick.”
I didn’t have much of a relationship with Dad, so today’s events made me more angry than sad.
But my boyfriend had spent three years with me abroad and been there through the worst time of my life.
Now he was calling me shameless because of some stranger.
He wouldn’t even let me explain.
Seeing my silence, my boyfriend suddenly softened his tone:
“Zara, your video’s everywhere online. Your reputation’s shot.”
“Here’s what we’ll do-give me half your company shares. As long as you don’t mind me having some… male needs on the side, I’ll come back and marry you.”
Hearing that, all my sadness vanished instantly.
So that’s what this was about.
My boyfriend’s background was similar to Dad’s-another ordinary kid who only got to study abroad thanks to my family’s
sponsorship.
Actually, Dad was the one who’d recommended him for that spot.
These two men were equally disgusting.
How could he have the nerve to take our money and then treat me like this?
I said coldly to the man on the phone:
“Marcus, we’re breaking up. You don’t deserve to be my boyfriend.”
The man immediately flew into a rage and screamed:
“You’re just some used-up woman, and you dare look down on me!”
“Let me tell you…”
I hung up directly and blocked both him and Dad.
