My name is Elena Rossi.
I’m thirty-six years old, and I own Rossi Design Group, a luxury interior design company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
I founded the business twelve years ago with twelve thousand dollars, a borrowed drafting table, and a belief that beautiful spaces could change the way people lived.
Today, the company employs forty people.
We design luxury homes, penthouses, restaurants, and boutique hotels.
Our offices overlook the Chicago River.
And our clients include people who spend more renovating a kitchen than most families spend purchasing a house.
I worked hard for that success.
There were years when I barely slept.
Projects that nearly bankrupted me.
Clients who changed their minds after months of work.
But I survived.
Then I met Brandon.
He was charming, handsome, and ambitious.
He told me he loved how independent I was.
“I don’t want your money,” he said during our first year together. “I want you.”
I believed him.
We married two years later.
For a while, we were happy.
Or at least, I thought we were.
Brandon worked in business development and occasionally introduced me to prospective clients.
He attended company events.
Joined me at charity dinners.
And became familiar with the expensive world my firm operated in.
I never made him a shareholder.
He never held an executive position.
But I trusted him.
That trust was my greatest mistake.
Fourteen months before our divorce, I discovered he’d been having an affair with Savannah Pierce.
She was twenty-eight.
Beautiful.
A luxury lifestyle influencer who believed every expensive gift proved how much someone loved her.
Brandon told me I had become too focused on work.
That Savannah understood him.
That I no longer made him feel important.
I spent months trying to save our marriage.
Then I discovered he’d been telling Savannah that he would eventually own half my company.
That ended everything.
The divorce was ugly.
Brandon demanded more than he was entitled to.
He questioned my business valuation.
Accused me of hiding assets.
And acted personally offended when my attorneys insisted that the company I’d established before our marriage wasn’t automatically his personal property.
