Climbing Into My Sister's Fiancé's Bed novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Check

Jolene refuses Lavinia's money in front of her friends, and Corinna asks her to be maid of honor and stay close to Sullivan.

Two women in tennis whites sat at the next table in the lobby, pretending to read the menu.

I knew them from the party. They were Lavinia's friends, and they were not reading.

"Sit," Lavinia said.

I stayed standing.

"Suit yourself." She uncapped a gold pen. "I'll be brief, since you were so brief with my son."

"He knocked on my door," I said. "I didn't drag him."

"Don't be vulgar."

"I'm not being vulgar. I'm being accurate."

She wrote a number on the check and tore it out along the perforation.

It had six figures. The first digit was a two.

"That's yours," she said. "Take it, drive to Atlanta, and don't come back before the wedding."

The women at the next table stopped breathing.

I looked at the check and then at her.

"You think I'm for sale?"

"I think you're a bartender who sleeps in other people's beds. The price was a courtesy."

I should have been ashamed.

I was only angry, clean and bright, the way I get when someone puts a price on me.

"Tell me how it works," I said, loud enough for the tennis women.

"You pay me to leave your son alone. Then he marries my sister, and you keep her."

"I keep nothing. I support her."

"You pay for my mother's dialysis. You paid for it before your son ever met Corinna."

Her smile was thin as a paper cut.

"The Foundation is generous," she said. "And it can be unmade."

There it was.

Not a threat, just the shape of one, set politely in front of me.

My mother went three mornings a week to a clinic, and she sat in a chair for four hours while a machine cleaned her blood.

She was fifty-seven. She was number nineteen on a list.

Lavinia knew both of those things, and I knew she knew.

"Write another zero," I said.

For the first time, Lavinia blinked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You want me gone for two hundred thousand, so I'm worth more than that to you."

I smiled. "Write the zero, and then I'll tell you no."

I took the check out of her fingers.

I tore it in half and tore the halves, and I put the pieces into the little silver ashtray in front of her friends.

"Your son came to me," I said. "He'll tell you so himself."

"My son," said Lavinia, very quietly, "does not do his own explaining."

"Jolene."

I turned.

Corinna stood by the revolving door in running clothes with her hair in a ponytail, holding two coffees.

My stomach dropped, then steadied.

I had practiced this moment in a hundred ways, and in none of them had she looked so calm.

"Corinna," Lavinia said, rising. "Darling. I'm afraid your sister has been..."

"Having a rough morning," Corinna said. "I know. I'm sorry, Lavinia."

She walked over and handed me a coffee.

It was hot. My hand shook around it.

"I booked her the room," Corinna said, smooth as glass. "She had too much champagne last night, and I didn't want her driving."

I had drunk club soda and she knew it.

Lavinia stared at her.

"She was in a green dress at seven in the morning."

"She's been in that dress since the party. She's a mess, I love her, and she's going to apologize for whatever she said."

I did not apologize.

I stood there with the coffee and waited for my sister to look at me.

I expected disappointment and patience.

She didn't. She looked at me with something else, quick and bright, and gone.

"Lavinia, would you give us a minute?"

Lavinia gathered her bag and her pen and left the torn check where it lay.

She stopped beside me on her way to the door.

"I will remember this," she said, so quietly that only I heard.

"I hope so," I said.

When she was gone, Corinna sat down in her chair.

"Sit," she said. "Drink your coffee."

I sat.

My heart was pounding. I couldn't read her at all.

"You're not going to ask me where I was last night," I said.

"Where were you last night?"

"Here."

"With who?"

I stared at her.

Either my sister was a saint or she was the best liar I had ever met, and she'd had twenty-nine years to practice.

"Corinna," I said, "listen to me."

"No. You listen." She put her cup down. "I want you to be my maid of honor."

I almost dropped mine.

"You can't be serious."

"I've never been more serious. I need you at every fitting, every dinner, every tasting between now and the wedding. Mom wants it, too."

"Why?"

"Because I want you close."

Her eyes were steady.

She reached across the table and took my wrist, hard, harder than a sister should.

"Stay close to him, Jolene," she said. "I mean it."

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