That was the thought echoing in my head as I sat in the coldest courtroom I had ever been inside, staring at the neat stack of documents placed between us like the final autopsy of our ten-year marriage, while the man I had once loved leaned back in his chair with the relaxed confidence of someone who believed he had already won everything that mattered.
Ethan Monroe had always laughed when he was certain of himself.
He laughed in investor meetings when junior founders stumbled over numbers.
He laughed at private dinners when he repeated stories about “the wild early years” of building Monroe Venture Labs from a half-rented SoHo loft into a company people in Manhattan business magazines called visionary, disruptive, inevitable.
And he laughed in that courtroom because he thought the woman across from him was exactly what he had spent a decade deciding I was.
Decorative. Convenient. Peripheral.
Harmless.
