He Begged Me to Forgive Her, Then Lost Everything novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: What the Company Was

"Thank you," I said. "That's everything I needed."

I took the phone out of my bag, touched the red dot, and watched the seconds stop.

Constance did not move.

The pantry door swung wide, and Hattie came out with her phone held high and a dinner roll in her other hand.

"Ma'am, as a registered nurse," she said, "your soup is cold, and so is your whole life."

"Hattie."

"I'm leaving. I'm leaving with the bread."

We walked out past the butler, who held the front door and said, "Good night, Mrs. Kinsale," with a straight face.

"Did you get it?" Hattie whispered on the steps, and I held up the phone, and she screamed into her own fist.

"The stairs line, Willa. I have goose bumps on my goose bumps."

"Go home and feed the cat," I said.

She went off down the drive, singing, with the roll.

Tiernan was sitting on the tailgate of his truck at the foot of the forty-one steps.

He had not gone home, and he had not gone to bed.

He took one look at my face, and he reached for my hand.

At midnight in the boat shop, he pulled a folded page out of a coffee can.

It was soft at the creases.

"I said I'd show you the clause," he said.

The paper was a single sheet with a signature at the bottom in a younger, angrier hand.

The line he put his thumb on read that Mr. Kenmare would never speak of Mr. Lowry, Lowry Freight or Mrs. Kinsale.

"It named me," I said.

"Warner wanted you off the table before I could say a word to you."

"I wrote the first routing engine in our dorm room," Tiernan said. "It ran on a laptop with a cracked screen."

"His father had forty trucks and a bad back. I had an idea."

"We built it together. Then he decided it was his, and his mother agreed."

"Why didn't you fight it?"

"Because I was thirty-two and tired, and I'd watched him cry in a lawyer's office."

"I thought, let him keep it, it's only a company."

He folded the page along its old creases.

"I broke that clause on your landing. They could sue me tomorrow."

"Let them."

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