Chapter 8 - The Lawsuit
The papers were served two weeks later, on a sunny Saturday morning when they were all in the backyard, Julian teaching the boys how to ride their new bikes without training wheels. The process server walked up the driveway, an apologetic look on his face, and handed Audrey an envelope thick with legal documents.
She opened it with shaking hands. The headline blared at her: MADISON ELIZABETH CARTER, PLAINTIFF, v. JULIAN CHARLES FOSTER AND AUDREY ROSE BENNETT, DEFENDANTS.
The lawsuit was absurd. It was offensive. It was also terrifying.
Madison was claiming wrongful termination, emotional distress, and—most damning of all—intentional infliction of emotional distress against Audrey, alleging that she had “maliciously and with full forethought concealed the existence of the plaintiff’s fiancé’s biological children for a period of four years, thereby depriving the plaintiff of her intended marriage, her expected position as Mrs. Julian Foster, and the social and financial benefits attendant thereto.”
Fiancé.
Audrey looked up at Julian, who had gone completely still beside her, the color draining from his face. “Fiancé?” she repeated, her voice hollow. “She’s claiming you were engaged? That you were going to marry her?”
“Of course not,” he said immediately, stepping toward her, his hands out like he was calming a spooked horse. “Audrey, you have to believe me. There was never an engagement. Never a ring. Never a conversation about marriage. That kiss you saw? It was the first and last time anything ever happened between us. I was drunk, I was miserable, I missed you so badly I could barely breathe, and she was there, and I made the worst mistake of my life. But it was one mistake. One kiss. That’s all. She’s lying. She’s making this up to hurt us. To take the boys.”
The last sentence hung in the air, heavy and poisonous. Because that was what this was really about, wasn’t it? Madison didn’t care about lost wages or emotional distress. She cared about revenge. She cared that the man she’d set her sights on had chosen his ex-wife and two secret children over her. She cared that she’d lost. And if she couldn’t have Julian, she was going to make sure no one could—especially not Audrey.
The next month was a nightmare. The tabloids got hold of the story. BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET TWINS: THE WIFE WHO HID THEM AND THE MISTRESS WHO SUED FOR IT ALL screamed the headlines. Paparazzi camped outside their house in Albany, taking photos of the boys through the fence, publishing them with cruel captions about “the illegitimate Foster heirs.” Julian’s father showed up at the penthouse unannounced, red-faced and furious, telling Julian he was ruining the family name, that he should pay Madison whatever she wanted and send Audrey and the boys away, that “Foster men don’t let their dirty laundry air in public.”
Julian told him to go to hell.
He stood by Audrey through all of it. He held her when she cried about the boys seeing their faces in the supermarket tabloids. He sat up with her until three in the morning going over legal documents. He issued a public statement—something he’d never done in his entire career—saying, Audrey Bennett is the love of my life. Henry and Leo Foster are my entire world. Any claim that I was engaged to anyone other than Audrey is categorically false. We will fight this lawsuit with every resource at our disposal, and we will win. Not just for us. For every family that has ever been targeted by someone who wants to destroy what they can’t have.
The statement went viral. People took sides. #TeamAudrey and #TeamMadison trended on Twitter for days. Strangers sent hate mail to their house. Strangers sent flowers and letters of support. The boys’ school had to hire extra security. It was overwhelming. Exhausting. And through it all, Audrey watched Julian change—not back into the cold, closed-off man he’d been, but into something stronger. Something softer. Someone who understood that love wasn’t about being perfect. It was about showing up. Even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.
The trial started on a cold, gray morning in November. Julian’s legal team was the best money could buy, but Madison’s lawyer was good—slick, charismatic, a man who knew exactly how to twist the truth until it looked like a lie. He painted Audrey as a gold-digger who’d hidden the twins to leverage a bigger settlement. He painted Julian as a weak, henpecked man who’d let his ex-wife manipulate him. He put Madison on the stand, and she cried real tears, holding up a fake engagement ring, telling the jury about the “perfect life” she and Julian had been planning before Audrey had “stolen” everything.
It was working. Audrey could see it in the jury’s faces. The doubt. The judgment. By the end of the first week, even their own lawyer was warning them that they might lose, that a jury might very well award Madison millions in “damages,” that the boys might be forced to undergo psychological evaluations, that their entire private lives would be picked apart in open court.
“I can’t do this,” Audrey told Julian that night, sitting on the edge of their hotel bed, her face in her hands. “I can’t let them do this to the boys. I can’t let them sit there and listen to strangers say terrible things about us. Maybe… maybe we should just settle. Give her whatever she wants. Make it go away.”
Julian knelt in front of her, taking her hands in his. “And then what?” he said softly. “She gets the money, but she doesn’t stop. She writes a book. She gives interviews. She spends the rest of her life telling lies about us, about our sons. They grow up reading those lies, Audrey. They grow up wondering if any of it is true. Is that what you want?”
“Of course not,” she whispered. “But what else can we do?”
May you like
He smiled. It was that familiar, dangerous, I’ve got a plan smile she hadn’t seen since the early days of their marriage, when he’d take on impossible deals and win them just because he refused to lose.
“We don’t settle,” he said. “We fight fire with fire. And tomorrow… tomorrow I’m going to take the stand. And I’m going to tell the jury the truth. All of it. Every last messy, painful, human detail. And then we’ll see who they believe.”
