Back With Baby, Ex Regrets Deeply novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Three Hundred Thousand

The studio was so quiet I could hear a fly bumping against the white blind.

"Say that again," I said.

"Three hundred thousand." Dorian rubbed his face with both hands. "Wired to my account at eight-fourteen that morning. I watched it land on my phone in the parking garage."

"You're lying."

"I've lied to you plenty, Faye. Not about this." He dug his phone out of his back pocket and held it up to me. "Here. Look."

I didn't want to take it.

I took it.

It was his banking app, scrolled back three years.

A Friday in late April.

"Incoming wire. Odell, Gordon. $300,000.00. Memo: consulting."

Consulting.

I stood in my mother's studio and looked at the word until it stopped being a word.

"He came to me three weeks before," Dorian said. "In his office. Shut the door. Said Kincaid wanted you, and you'd said no because of me, and the company had maybe a month. He said I could keep being his operations guy on a sinking ship, or I could get paid and get promoted."

"And you said yes."

"I had debts. Bad ones. A guy in Revere I owed sixty grand on a playoff series." He laughed without any sound. "Your dad knew. He knew before I told him. He knew exactly what I cost."

"He told you what to say."

"He told me it had to be public. That you'd only go if you were humiliated enough to want to disappear." Dorian looked at the floor. "He said a private breakup, you'd cry for a month and then marry some guy who teaches art. It had to be the counter. It had to be in front of people."

I put my hand against the gray wall to stay up.

My father in his office, choosing the room.

My father on the phone on the plaza, picking up on the first ring.

He'd been waiting to hear if it worked.

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