At nine the next morning, Tran Thuy walked into Khoi Hang Technology carrying boxes of wedding candy.

Lam Hieu walked beside him in a new designer dress, deliberately displaying the ring on her finger.

Everyone understood what they were celebrating.

—Congratulations, President Tran!

—Congratulations, General Manager Lam!

Lam Hieu smiled as employees surrounded her.

She had waited years for this moment.

Yesterday, she had been a secretary.

Today, she believed she was the woman standing beside the owner of the company.

Then the HR director came running from the elevator.

His face was completely pale.

—President Tran!

Tran Thuy frowned.

—What’s wrong?

—An extraordinary shareholders’ meeting has been called.

—By whom?

The director swallowed.

—Ms. To Nhien.

The smile disappeared from Lam Hieu’s face.

Tran Thuy laughed.

—My ex-wife?

—Yes.

—She doesn’t even work here.

The director lowered his voice.

—Sir… she controls sixty percent of the voting shares.

The box slipped from Tran Thuy’s hands.

Wedding candies scattered across the marble floor.

—Impossible.

Twenty minutes later, he stormed into the conference room.

I was already sitting at the head of the table.

Lawyer Vuong sat on my right.

Three major shareholders were opposite me.

A thick stack of documents rested in front of us.

Tran Thuy stared at me.

—What game are you playing?

I took a sip of coffee.

—Sit down.

His face darkened.

—To Nhien, don’t forget that we divorced yesterday.

—I haven’t forgotten.

I pushed the 10-million-yuan check across the table.

—Thank you for the reminder.

Lam Hieu entered behind him.

She pointed at me.

—You already took the money! What else do you want?

I looked at her.

—My company.

Silence.

Tran Thuy slammed both hands onto the table.

—Khoi Hang is mine!

Lawyer Vuong finally opened the old agreement.

—Mr. Tran, ten years ago Ms. To temporarily placed sixty percent of her shares under your name.

He turned to the final page.

—The agreement had a ten-year term.

Tran Thuy froze.

—That’s impossible.

—It expired this morning.

I watched the color disappear from his face.

He grabbed the document.

His own signature was there.

So was mine.

And so was the notarization.

Ten years earlier, when we had nothing, he had insisted on the arrangement because investors wanted a single visible founder controlling the company.

Back then, he had held my hands and promised:

—They’re only under my name. What’s yours will always be yours.

Apparently, he remembered the shares.

He had simply forgotten whose they were.

Lam Hieu whispered:

—But President Tran founded this company.

I opened my old notebook.

—Did he?

I placed the first patent record on the table.

—The original Tinh Tran algorithm.

Another document.

—The security architecture that saved the company in 2015.

Another.

—Our first international licensing agreement.

Every document carried my name.

Tran Thuy stared at them.

For ten years, I had allowed him to become the face of everything we built together.

Eventually, he had mistaken visibility for ownership.

I looked around the table.

—Let’s begin the vote.

Tran Thuy suddenly understood.

—Vote for what?

Lawyer Vuong answered calmly:

—Removal of the current chairman.

His face twisted.

—You can’t remove me from my own company!

I looked directly at him.

—You told me yesterday that I had never managed the company.

I paused.

—Today I’ll learn.

The vote took less than fifteen minutes.

With my sixty percent, the result had been decided before Tran Thuy entered the room.

He was removed.

I became controlling chairwoman.

Lam Hieu was dismissed from her management position pending an internal review.

She exploded.

—You’re doing this because you’re jealous!

I almost laughed.

—Jealous of what?

I pointed toward Tran Thuy.

—I already gave him to you.

Then I pushed the wedding candy lying near my shoe toward her.

—Consider this my wedding gift.

Tran Thuy followed me into the corridor.

—Nhien!

For the first time in years, he sounded frightened.

I stopped.

—What?

—We built Khoi Hang together.

I smiled.

—Finally, you remember.

His lips moved, but no words came.

Then he whispered:

—Was the divorce a trap?

—No.

I shook my head.

—The divorce was exactly what you wanted.

I held up the old shareholder agreement.

—This is simply something you forgot.

Over the next month, I returned to the company officially.

The first week was difficult.

People remembered me only as “President Tran’s wife.”

Then senior engineers began recognizing my name from the original technical documentation.

Several employees discovered that half the systems they had studied during training contained architecture I had written years earlier.

And gradually, the title changed.

Not Mrs. Tran.

Not the abandoned wife.

Chairwoman To.

Three months later, an internal audit uncovered something I hadn’t expected.

While I had been at home believing Tran Thuy was managing the company responsibly, Lam Hieu had approved questionable consulting payments to companies connected to her relatives.

Millions had left Khoi Hang.

When I confronted Tran Thuy, even he looked shocked.

—You didn’t know? —I asked.

He stared at Lam Hieu’s signatures.

Apparently love had made him careless.

Or arrogance had.

Either way, the result was the same.

Lam Hieu disappeared from his side soon afterward.

Without the presidency, company accounts, chauffeur and executive office, Tran Thuy suddenly wasn’t the man she had fought ten years to obtain.

Six months after the divorce, he came to see me.

He looked thinner.

—Nhien, can we start again?

I stared at the man I’d once carried to the hospital when we couldn’t afford a taxi.

Part of me remembered loving him.

But memory wasn’t a reason to return.

—No.

He lowered his head.

—Because of Lam Hieu?

—Because of you.

I placed the 10-million-yuan check in front of him.

I had never cashed it.

His eyes widened.

—Why didn’t you use it?

I smiled.

—Because you misunderstood something from the beginning.

I pushed the check back.

—You thought this was enough money for me to live the rest of my life.

Then I looked through the glass wall at the company we had once built from nothing.

—But Tran Thuy…

—I never needed your money.

—I only needed you to stop standing on what belonged to me.

He left without taking the check.

I framed it instead.

Not because ten million yuan mattered.

But because whenever I looked at it, I remembered the night my husband placed it in front of me and believed he was buying me out of his life.

He didn’t know that I was signing away only the marriage.

Not my work.

Not my shares.

Not the company.

And certainly not myself.

Tran Thuy paid ten million yuan to get rid of his wife.

The next morning, he discovered that the wife he had discarded…

still owned sixty percent of the empire he thought was his.