He Reversed His Vasectomy for Another Woman, So I Took Everything novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Foot of the Stairs

I picked up my pearls from the boardroom table before the guards could say anything.

Then I walked out on my own feet, with Rosemary behind me, and I did not look at my father.

My father's house in Brookline sits at the end of a drive lined with copper beeches.

I drove there alone at six that evening, because I could not leave it where it was.

He opened the door himself.

"I wondered if you'd come," Franklin said.

"You voted against me."

"I moved a motion. There's a difference."

He led me into the study and poured two brandies, and I did not take mine.

The room smelled of leather and pipe smoke, the same as every Sunday of my childhood.

"You have a perfectly good life, Lydia," he said. "A husband. A house. A name that opens every door in this city. Why would you burn all that down over a girl in a pink blazer?"

"He emptied my mother's trust."

"He moved it."

"He forged my name."

"Your name is on every document. That's all the law requires." He sat behind his desk. "I made you safe. I have been making you safe since your mother died, and you've never once thanked me."

"Safe from what?"

"From the sort of man you chose before."

I went cold.

"Don't."

"You'd have taken that money and gone back to him by Christmas." He lifted the glass. "Ask Carraro what he took when he left you. Ask him how much."

"He took nothing."

"He took two million dollars from my account, the night before you two were going to run. I have the transfer. Ask him."

I had seen that transfer, five years earlier, on a sheet of paper my father slid across this same desk.

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