They Threw the Wife Out with Nothing – Then Her Name Froze the Entire Courtroom

Chapter 4: The Collapse of the Dalton Empire

The walk from the courtroom to the parking lot felt like a funeral procession for Gregory Dalton’s life. The press, usually uninterested in the divorce proceedings of mid-level tech CEOs, had been tipped off.

The name Kensington had gone out over the police scanners and court blogs like a distress flare. By the time Gregory pushed open the heavy double doors of the courthouse, a wall of flashbulbs blinded him.

“Mr. Dalton, is it true you tried to defraud Harrison Kensington’s daughter?” “Did you really throw her out in a blizzard?” “Gregory, are you insolvent?”

The questions were like darts, piercing the armor of arrogance he had worn so comfortably just an hour ago. Beside him, Lucille was using her crocodile-skin handbag to shield her face, muttering curses about vultures and low-class peasants.

Arthur Grimshaw, the Shark, was nowhere to be seen. He had slipped out the back entrance the moment the judge pounded the gavel, realizing that a frozen client was a non-paying client.

Gregory pushed through the crowd, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He reached his Aston Martin, fumbling for the keys.

He needed to get to the office. He needed to fix this. It was just a misunderstanding, a leverage play; he could smooth it over.

But when he slid into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition, the engine sputtered and died. The dashboard lit up with a singular, terrifying message: “Remote Disable. Contact Lender.”

“No,” Gregory hissed, jamming the start button again. “No, no, no!”

“What is it?” Lucille shrieked from the passenger seat. “Start the car, Gregory! These people are touching the windows!”

“They killed the car,” Gregory stared at the dashboard in horror. “The lease… it’s under the company name. The assets are frozen.”

They had to take a taxi. The ride to Dalton Tech was silent, filled only with the heavy breathing of two people watching their world collapse in real time.

When they arrived at the glass-and-steel tower in Midtown, Gregory didn’t even wait for his change. He sprinted into the lobby, ignoring the startled look of the security guard—a man named Ralph, whom Gregory had never bothered to greet in five years.

“Mr. Dalton, wait!” Ralph called out, stepping out from behind the desk. “Access has been restricted.”

Gregory spun around, his face flushed.

“Restricted? I own this building! I am the CEO!” Gregory shouted.

“Not as of twenty minutes ago, sir,” Ralph said, looking uncomfortable but firm. “We got a call from the receivership court. A Mr. Henry Cole sent over a writ. No one enters the executive suite without a federal monitor present. Your badge has been deactivated.”

Gregory stared at the turnstiles. The little light on the scanner was a solid, unyielding red.

He looked around the lobby. Employees were whispering, glancing at him over their lattes. He saw the pity in their eyes—or worse, the amusement. They knew. The email had probably already gone out.

“Fine!” Gregory spat, straightening his jacket. “I’ll work from home. I have the merger call at two. I don’t need this office.”

But the nightmare was only beginning. By the time Gregory and Lucille returned to the mansion via a second taxi—which Gregory had to pay for with the crumpled cash he found in his pocket because his corporate Amex had been declined—the reality of the freeze was setting in.

The mansion was eerily quiet. Usually at this hour, the housekeeper, Maria, would be vacuuming, or the cook would be prepping lunch.

“Maria!” Lucille called out, dropping her furs on the entry bench. “We need tea and something strong for Gregory!”

Silence. They walked into the kitchen; it was empty. On the marble island sat a neat pile of keys and a note. Lucille snatched it up.

“Mrs. Dalton, the agency called. They said the automatic payroll deposit for this month was reversed due to insufficient funds. We have been instructed to cease work immediately. We have taken the liberty of clearing out the perishables as payment for the last week. Maria.”

Lucille stared at the empty refrigerator.

“They took the truffles. They took the champagne. They took the staff!” Lucille cried.

“Mother,” Gregory said, sinking onto a barstool. He put his head in his hands. “It’s over. The merger… Sterling won’t sign if the assets are frozen. The deal is dead.”

“Don’t you dare say that!” Lucille snapped, her survival instincts kicking in. “You are a Dalton! We do not lose to trash like Samantha! She’s bluffing. She wants you back, that’s all this is. A tantrum—a very expensive tantrum.”

“She’s a Kensington, Mother. Do you know what that means?” Gregory looked up, his eyes wild. “It means she has more money in her checking account than my company has in total valuation. She doesn’t want me back. She wants to crush me.”

His phone rang. It was the only thing still working, likely because the bill wasn’t due until the next day. The caller ID showed “Sterling Enterprises – CEO Office.”

Gregory took a deep breath. He had to charm his way out of this. He had to be the salesman.

“Mr. Sterling,” Gregory answered, forcing a laugh. “I assume you’ve heard the rumors? Just a little legal hiccup with the ex-wife. Standard divorce leverage. Nothing that affects the IP or the—”

“Gregory,” The voice on the other end was like liquid nitrogen. “I’m not calling about rumors. I’m calling because I just had lunch with Harrison Kensington.”

Gregory’s blood ran cold.

“Harrison is an old friend of my father,” Sterling continued. “He showed me some interesting documents, specifically regarding the ownership of the code you’re trying to sell me. It seems you didn’t write the core algorithm, Gregory. Your wife did.”

“That’s a lie!” Gregory stammered. “She’s an art school dropout!”

“She has a degree in mathematics from MIT under her maiden name, Gregory. She dropped out of art school to hide from the press. She wrote the code. The timestamps on the original repository match her personal laptop, which her lawyers have just submitted into evidence,” Sterling said.

There was a long pause.

“You tried to sell me stolen goods,” Sterling said quietly. “My lawyers are drafting a suit for bad-faith negotiation. Expect to be served by morning. Do not contact me again.”

The line went dead. Gregory dropped the phone. It clattered onto the expensive Italian tile.

“What did he say?” Lucille asked, her voice trembling.

“Sam wrote the code,” Gregory whispered, the realization hitting him like a physical blow.

He thought back to those late nights in the apartment. He remembered him complaining about the bugs in the software, her looking over his shoulder, pointing at the screen.

“Maybe if you move that bracket there, or change the variable loop,” she would say.

He had thought she was just guessing. He had thought she was just lucky. She had been fixing his incompetence for ten years.

“She played us!” Lucille hissed. “The little witch played the long game! We have to fix this!”

“Gregory stood up, pacing the kitchen. We need money. Cash. We need to hire a new lawyer—someone who isn’t afraid of the Kensingtons. We need to fight the freeze.”

“I have my jewelry,” Lucille said, clutching her pearls. “And the artwork!”

“The artwork is insured under the company policy,” Gregory said. “We can’t sell it. But the jewelry? Yes. Gather it up. We’ll go to the broker on 47th Street.”

It was a desperate, humiliating plan, but it was all they had.

Chapter 5: The Truth About Winter

An hour later, Lucille Dalton, the queen of high society, walked into a pawn shop. She called it a “secondary market broker.”

She had a velvet bag full of diamonds. The broker, a man with a loupe stuck permanently to his eye, dumped the contents onto the felt tray.

He picked up the heavy diamond necklace Gregory had given Lucille for her 60th birthday. He examined it, then he picked up the sapphire ring, then the emerald brooch.

He put the loupe down and looked at Lucille with a bored expression.

“I can give you four hundred dollars for the gold weight,” the broker said.

Lucille gasped.

“Four hundred? These are worth fifty thousand! That necklace is a Vancraftoft!” Lucille cried.

“It’s a replica,” the broker said flatly. “High-quality cubic zirconia set in 14-karat gold plating. All of it—paste.”

Lucille turned slowly to Gregory.

“Gregory, you bought these. You told me they were investment pieces,” Lucille said.

Gregory’s face was the color of ash. He remembered the years of tight budgets, the years he needed to look rich while actually drowning in debt.

He had bought the fakes to keep his mother happy, to keep up appearances, telling himself he would replace them with real ones once the company took off. He had never gotten around to it.

“I… I had cash flow issues,” Gregory mumbled.

Lucille didn’t scream. She didn’t yell. She simply walked over to her son and slapped him across the face. The sound echoed in the small, dusty shop.

“You are a failure,” she whispered. “And you have dragged me into the gutter with you.”

They walked out of the shop with nothing. The snow had started to fall again, covering the city in white.

But this time, they weren’t the ones inside the warm mansion looking out. They were on the street, and the cold was biting deep.

Desperation makes people do dangerous things. For Gregory Dalton, stripped of his fortune, his car, and his dignity, the only currency he had left was his voice.

If he couldn’t beat Samantha in the courtroom, he would destroy her in the living rooms of America. It was Brittany who gave him the idea, ironically, just before she dumped him.

She had met him at a coffee shop—he couldn’t afford dinner—to return his spare apartment key.

“You’re trending, Greg,” she said, looking at her phone but not in a good way. “Everyone is calling you the Ice King because of the blizzard thing. But people love a redemption arc, or a victim.”

“I am the victim!” Gregory insisted, grabbing her hand. She pulled it away. “She lied to me for ten years! She pretended to be poor! That’s fraud!”

“So say that,” Brittany said, standing up. “Go on TV. Cry. Say she manipulated you. Say she was a spy for her father the whole time, trying to steal your ideas. People hate billionaires, Greg. Play the underdog.”

She left him with the bill for two lattes, which he paid with the last of the cash from his pocket. But the seed was planted.

Two days later, Gregory sat in the studio of The Morning Truth, a tabloid talk show known for its sensationalism. The host, a man named Chip Darrow, leaned in with faux sympathy.

“So let me get this straight, Gregory,” Chip said to the camera. “You marry a woman you think is a struggling waitress. You support her. You build a life. And the whole time, she is secretly the heiress to the Kensington Empire, spying on your tech company?”

“It broke my heart, Chip,” Gregory said, looking into the camera with practiced sadness. “I loved Samantha. I didn’t care about money. But she was taking notes. She was feeding my proprietary data to her father’s conglomerates. And when I confronted her, when I asked for a divorce because I couldn’t handle the betrayal, she used her father’s lawyers to freeze me out. She threw me out. And the story about her being kicked out in a blizzard? Fabricated.”

Gregory lied smoothly.

“She took a private car. She staged that photo of her walking in the snow. It’s all a PR stunt to ruin a self-made man,” Gregory claimed.

The interview aired live. In the brownstone in Brooklyn, Samantha watched the screen, her face impassive.

Henry Cole sat beside her, jotting notes.

“He’s good,” Henry admitted. “Lying through his teeth, but he’s selling it. The social media sentiment is shifting. People are calling you a corporate spy.”

Samantha took a sip of tea.

“He forgot about the security system,” Samantha said.

“The one at the mansion?” Henry asked.

“Gregory was always so proud of his smart home,” Samantha said, a cold smile touching her lips. “He installed cameras everywhere: the driveway, the library, the porch. He wanted to monitor the staff. But he forgot that I was the admin for the cloud account.”

“You have the footage?” Henry asked.

“I have everything,” Samantha said. “Him laughing. Lucille checking her watch. Me begging. The gates locking behind me.”

Samantha set her cup down.

“And I have something else: audio from the library,” Samantha added.

“Release it,” Henry said. “Not to the court—to the internet.”

Within an hour, the narrative didn’t just shift; it capsized. Samantha didn’t go on a talk show. She simply posted a single video file to a new Twitter account with the handle “The Real Samantha.”

The caption was three words: “The truth about winter.”

The video opened with the timestamped security footage. The resolution was 4K. It showed Samantha, tear-streaked and shivering, standing before Gregory and Lucille.

The audio was crystal clear.

“You were a placeholder—a sturdy, reliable placeholder,” Lucille’s voice rang out.

“Consider it severance pay,” Gregory’s voice followed. “You’re still just the waitress I met at the diner.”

“Throw her out. And for heaven’s sake, don’t take the silverware,” Lucille added.

Then the cut to the exterior camera: the heavy gates closing. Samantha walking alone into the blinding white snow. Gregory visible in the window, holding a drink, watching her go.

The internet exploded. The hashtags changed instantly. #JusticeForSamantha trended number one globally within twenty minutes. #BoycottDaltonTech followed.

But the most damaging one was #Placeholder. Women all over the world began sharing their stories of being used and discarded, rallying behind Samantha.

Gregory was in the green room of the TV studio, waiting to be congratulated, when his phone started buzzing uncontrollably. Not calls—notifications. Thousands of them.

He opened Twitter. He saw the video. He saw the comments.

“He left her to die in the cold.” “Lucille Dalton is a monster.” “I hope she takes every penny.”

The door to the green room opened. Chip Darrow walked in, but the sympathy was gone.

“You need to leave,” Chip said coldly. “Now, before the protesters block the exit.”

“But the segment—” Gregory started.

“We’re retracting it,” Chip said. “We can’t be seen supporting a monster, Gregory. You lied to us. Get out.”

Gregory ran out the back door, pulling his jacket over his head. But the real blow came when he got back to the temporary apartment he was renting on a weekly rate.

Brittany was there, packing her bags.

“I saw the video,” she said, not looking at him.

“It was edited!” Gregory cried. “It’s out of context!”

“She was crying, Greg. You laughed at her. You and your mother were drinking tea while she walked into a blizzard,” Brittany zipped up her suitcase. “I can handle a jerk. I can’t handle a sociopath. And honestly, I don’t want to be the next placeholder.”

“Brittany, wait! I have nothing else!” Gregory pleaded.

“You have your mother,” Brittany said, opening the door. “You two deserve each other.”

She slammed the door. Gregory stood in the silence of the cheap apartment. The walls were thin; he could hear the neighbors arguing.

He looked at his reflection in the hallway mirror. He looked older, smaller.

The phone rang again. It was Lucille.

“Gregory,” she sounded small, terrified. “The police are here.”

“Police? Why?”

“They have a warrant, Gregory! For the house, for the computers,” Lucille began to sob. “They’re talking about embezzlement. They’re saying… they’re saying I spent company money on personal accounts. They’re saying you authorized it.”

Gregory dropped the phone. The freeze was no longer just about money; it was about freedom. Samantha wasn’t just taking the company; she was coming for their lives.