After the Divorce, I Exposed My Ex-Husband's First Love's Con

For the next few days, Isabel came out to the old estate every other day, calling it "helping Tony sort through his old things." What she actually did was make trouble for me at every turn. Either she knocked over my ink on purpose, or she hid my carving knife. There was always some little move. I couldn't be bothered to fight over any of it. I put everything into the book restoration. That day I was going through the celadon brush washer my grandfather had left behind. It had been his favorite piece while he was alive, the clay fine and dense, the glaze soft and warm. I had just set it on the worktable when Isabel, who'd slipped up behind me without my noticing, slammed her arm hard into my hand. "Oh no!" She cried out, and with a crisp cracking sound the celadon brush washer hit the flagstones and broke into three or four pieces. I turned, frowning, and saw Isabel with her eyes red, waving her hands. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to! I only wanted to see what you were fixing, and my foot slipped—" Before she'd finished, Anthony strode in. The moment he saw the shards on the ground, his face went dark, and he snapped at me. "Penelope! This was Grandfather's favorite brush washer. How could you be so careless?" Isabel tugged at his sleeve, sobbing softly. "Tony, don't blame her. It's my fault, I shouldn't have gone over there. It's all on me." Anthony comforted her gently. "It's got nothing to do with you." Then he turned to me, his eyes cold as ice, and said sharply, "Penelope, apologize to Isabel." "The cost of the brush washer comes out of your settlement." I said flatly, "She's the one who knocked it over. Not me." Isabel shot back at once, her voice shrill. "You clearly lost your grip on it yourself. Don't try to pin it on me!" I took the kintsugi repair toolkit out of my kit and said plainly, "Grandfather's brush washer doesn't need you to pay for it. I can fix it myself." "As for who's lying, there are security cameras in the courtyard. Pull the footage and we'll know." Isabel panicked instantly, clutching Anthony's arm and shaking it. "Tony, I really didn't mean to." "My foot just slipped. You have to believe me." Anthony's brow stayed tightly drawn as he watched me, saying nothing, open the toolkit, mix the lacquer, patch the body, lay the gold leaf, every motion smooth and sure. Half an hour later, the broken brush washer was whole again, the gold leaf tracing a fine seam along each break, so that the damage lent it a kind of beauty settled deep with the years. Anthony stood off to the side, something complicated in his eyes. He'd known me for three years. He knew I could restore old books, but he'd never once seen me do kintsugi, and he'd never known my hands were this good. I set down the tools, wiped my hands, and said in a mocking tone, "Miss Fox, next time you want to frame someone, do me a favor and use your head first." "At the very least, next time you set me up, pick a spot with no cameras!" Isabel's face went green, then white, and for a long while she couldn't force out a word. Anthony started to speak, then stopped, and in the end pulled Isabel, who still wanted to argue, out with him.

That night, while I was restoring the 《Nanhua Classic》, I found a few sheets of yellowed deckle-edged paper tucked into a hidden layer of the spine. I eased them out with tweezers, brushed off the dust, and my grandfather's bold handwriting slowly came clear. It was his diary from back then. “The Henson family's young boy was locked in a warehouse at the end of the lane today. Penny heard him crying, climbed in through the window to bring him food, and even gave him the half of the bamboo-grain ink stick her father left behind, as a keepsake. The child was so frightened he didn't even say thank you.” “The Fox girl next door found out and claimed she was the one who saved him. When the Hensons came to thank her, she didn't deny it. Such a wicked thing. A child that young, and already so full of schemes.” “Penny's heart is wide open. She turned around and forgot all about it. No matter. The Henson waters run deep, and it's just as well she stays out of them.” My heart was shaking violently. So the little boy from my childhood memory, the one trapped in that dark warehouse, crying so hard he trembled, was Anthony Henson. So the person I climbed through a window to feed and pull out as a child was him, of all people. How laughable. For over a decade he'd held up an impostor thief as his savior, and treated the person who actually saved him as a gold-digger clawing after money and power. I gripped the torn diary pages and went straight to Henson Group headquarters. The receptionist tried to stop me from going in. I leaned against the front desk and said flatly, “Tell Anthony Henson I have something to say about the person who saved his life.” “If he won't see me, I'll stand in the lobby downstairs and shout it, so the whole company can hear the story of how their Mr. Henson repaid a debt.” Not two minutes later, the receptionist, face gone pale, let me go up. In the president's office, Isabel Fox was nestled against Anthony's side, pointing at some document and cooing about something. The moment she saw me come in, she straightened up and glared at me, on guard. “What are you doing here again? Tony doesn't want to see you!” I ignored her and slapped the torn diary pages down on the desk in front of Anthony. “See for yourself.” Anthony picked up the pages, ran his eyes over them twice, and his face darkened in an instant. He flung the paper back onto the desk, fury churning in his black eyes. “Penelope, you'd forge your own grandfather's belongings just to smear Isabel? Are you really that vicious?” I laughed out of sheer anger. “Anthony Henson, if you're blind, go see an eye doctor.” “You can't tell whether that's my grandfather's handwriting?” “The age of the paper, the oxidation of the ink. Any appraiser you like can verify it.” He gave a cold snort. “Who knows what cheap trick you used to fake it.” “I know what kind of person Isabel is far better than you do.” “If it weren't for her back then, I'd have died in that warehouse long ago.” “You forge shoddy evidence like this to win me back and it doesn't make you sick?” I looked at the disgust in his eyes, and then it all struck me as unbearably absurd. “Anthony Henson, you think far too much of yourself.” “I came here only because I didn't want you playing the fool, gratefully bowing to someone who's deceived you for over ten years.” He roared in a rage, “Shut up!” “Penelope, let me make this perfectly clear to you. Even without Isabel, I never loved you. Not once.” “I only married you because it was my grandfather's dying wish. Don't flatter yourself, you gold-digger!” The words drove into my heart like a sharp blade. Three years of marriage, and it wasn't as if I'd never felt something. The light I left on when he worked late into the night, the porridge I simmered when his stomach hurt, the seal I carved by hand for his birthday. In his eyes, all of it had only been my way of clinging for status. I looked at the cold disgust in his eyes, and suddenly it all felt utterly pointless. I bent down, picked the torn pages off the floor, folded them carefully, and slipped them into my pocket. “Anthony Henson, go on and live happily with your savior.” “Whether you live or die from now on has nothing to do with me. Sooner or later you'll learn what the truth really is.” “And when that day comes, I'd like to see how you clean up the mess.” With that, I turned and walked out, without looking back. The moment the door closed, I heard Isabel's coaxing coo. “Tony, don't be angry, she's just jealous of me……” I didn't listen to the rest. I strode out of the office building. The late-autumn wind cut against my face, and it stung a little. I raised a hand to my cheek and only then realized that somewhere along the way, I'd started to cry. No matter. From this day on, Anthony Henson and I were even.

After I got back from the company, I shut myself in the west wing and dug out the old bronze box my grandfather had left behind. Inside was an old-fashioned voice recorder, the one he used to use back when he chatted with his old friends. It had long since gone dead. It took me forever to find a matching charger, and after fussing with it half the day I finally got it to charge, then pressed play. Static crackled, and then came my grandfather's aged voice. "Andrew, I ask you, what kind of thing is this?" "That Fox girl. Falsely claiming a debt of gratitude all those years ago was one thing, but last month my heart gave out, and she happened to be at the house. She saw me collapse on the floor, and instead of calling an ambulance, she went through my kesi pattern book and stole the weaving-technique manuscript." "If a neighbor hadn't been passing by and found me, this old life of mine would have been over." Andrew sounded angry as he said, "Why didn't you expose her?" My grandfather said with a sigh, "Expose what? The girl's barely a teenager. If word got out, her whole life would be ruined." "Besides, that Henson boy is so grateful to her he can't see straight. Even if I said something, no one would believe me." "Forget it, forget it. It's just a shame about the Pruitt kesi technique. Handed down for generations, and stolen just like that." Andrew asked, "Does your Penny know?" My grandfather let out a long breath. "I didn't tell her. That child is too stubborn. If she knew, she'd go and make a scene for sure." "She just needs to restore her old books in peace. The less she touches everything else, the better." The recording cut off there. Cold sank through me, and my body gave a faint tremble. So it turned out Isabel had not only stolen the debt of gratitude, she had left him to die and stolen the kesi technique my family had passed down. No wonder, before my grandfather passed, he had kept holding my hand, his lips moving as if to speak, but in the end he said nothing. No wonder he kept telling me, over and over, to stay away from the Hensons. My fists clenched, grief and fury churning in my chest. I lifted a hand and wiped the wetness from the corner of my eye, then carefully set the recorder back into the bronze box. My grandfather was too soft-hearted. He couldn't bring himself to expose her because she was young. But I, Penelope, could. Early the next morning I spread out the volume of Sinclair's poems as usual. The worm-eaten half page went deeper the more I picked at it, and all at once I noticed something seemed to be hidden in the layer inside the book's spine. Not ordinary lining paper. A sheet of mulberry-bark paper, folded very thin, tucked between two layers of pages. Worms had eaten away most of it, leaving only a corner showing. Something stirred in me. Old Mr. Henson had been careful his whole life. Hiding something important inside an old book fit his way of doing things perfectly. I held my breath, worked the bamboo lifter carefully along the stitching of the spine, and eased the mulberry-bark paper out bit by bit. The paper was yellowed and brittle, covered in old Mr. Henson's firm, forceful hand, written dense and close, in two parts. The first part was a supplementary will. "After my death, all the antique book holdings in the west wing of the old Henson estate shall belong to Penelope Pruitt of the Pruitt family. The Pruitts have shown kindness to the Hensons for generations. Every descendant of my Henson line must treat them well for generations to come, and never with disrespect." "Furthermore, the Fox girl, Isabel, falsely claimed a debt of gratitude in those years and is of poor character. She must never enter the Henson household. If Anthony insists on marrying her, he shall be stripped of his right to inherit his thirty percent share of Henson Group." The second part was a page of hurried notes recording the doubts around the car crash that had killed Anthony's father all those years ago. "Anthony's father's crash: the brake line was severed. This was no accident." "The driver responsible confessed before he died. He had taken money from Jasper Fox. Jasper Fox is Isabel Fox's father, the man I drove out of the industry over malicious competition years ago, who nursed a grudge ever since……" "A pity that the driver responsible is already dead. There is no evidence……" I held the sheet of paper, my hands shaking badly. So it wasn't only that the debt of gratitude had been stolen, not only that my grandfather had been left to die. Anthony's father had been murdered by Isabel Fox's father. And Anthony had taken his enemy's daughter for his savior, doted on her for over a decade, and was even going to marry her. What a colossal joke. I tucked the mulberry-bark paper carefully into my notebook, something I couldn't name churning in my chest. There was anger, and rue, and a thin thread of pity for Anthony. But the pity passed in an instant. He couldn't see people for what they were. He was blind in the eye and blind in the heart. For three years he had treated me with nothing but coldness. All of that was real. His reckoning was only just beginning. A week later, the city's cultural heritage exhibition officially opened. I was invited to take part as an antique book restorer, demonstrating the restoration of a Song-dynasty woodblock print on site. And Isabel, waving the banner of "Pruitt kesi heir," had also claimed one of the largest booths. She'd stolen my grandfather's weaving-technique manuscript and had the nerve to call herself a Pruitt heir. What a face on her. On opening day the hall was full of people coming and going. A crowd had gathered in front of Isabel's booth. She wore a modernized qipao, standing before a kesi folding screen, holding forth about how the Pruitt kesi was a craft handed down through her grandmother's family, something she had absorbed since childhood. The crowd let out little sounds of admiration every so often, and reporters were photographing her. "Miss Fox really is accomplished for someone so young. A heritage bearer at such a young age." "This kesi screen of A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains, the stitchwork is stunning. It looks exactly like the original painting!" Isabel was glowing with self-satisfaction. When she caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye, she deliberately lifted her chin, like a peacock that had just won a fight. I stood in front of my own booth, unhurriedly arranging my carving knives, and paid her no attention. At ten in the morning, the organizers had scheduled a live exchange among the heritage bearers. The host warmly invited Isabel up onto the stage and asked her to demonstrate the knot stitch, the core technique of the Pruitt kesi's "continuous warp, broken weft." This was a stitch unique to the Pruitts. My grandfather's manuscript had a diagram of it, but no written description of the actual method. Without the family's spoken formula, it simply couldn't be done. Isabel's smile froze for a moment, then she forced a composed look. "This stitch is rather complex. It's not really convenient to demonstrate on the spot. You can all just look at the finished pieces." I crossed my arms and stepped out from the crowd. "Come now, Miss Fox." "Everyone's here for the Pruitt kesi. Show us a little something, let us all broaden our horizons." She saw me, and her face changed in an instant. "Penelope? What are you playing at?" I walked up onto the stage and picked up the shuttle she'd left on the table. "Nothing at all." "I just heard Miss Fox is a Pruitt heir, and it happens I know a little about Pruitt kesi myself. I thought I'd ask you to teach me a thing or two."