Chapter 11: Posted

Kendrick had stopped on the bottom step.

He looked up at her.

"Delete it," he said.

"Hi, baby," said Danielle. "I brought the seating chart for the ball. The front door was open."

"Delete it, Danielle."

"Ask me nicely."

He went up the stairs toward her, and for a second I thought he'd take the phone out of her hand.

She thought so too.

She stepped back and held it behind her, smiling, the way I'd held my father's envelope behind me in the study.

He stopped two steps below her.

He looked at the phone, and at her, and back over his shoulder at me.

Then he walked past her and out the cellar door without another word.

Danielle watched him go.

Her smile stayed exactly where it was, but something behind it went sour.

Then she came down the stairs toward me, one step at a time, in heels, on stone.

"Well," she said. "Look at you."

I didn't say anything.

"Two weeks ago you were the heiress. Now you're the help who makes out with the boss in the basement."

She tilted her head.

"That's a fast fall, sweetie. Even for you."

"What do you want?"

"I want you gone."

She said it pleasantly.

"Off this hill. Out of this town. Back to New York, or wherever girls like you go."

She held up her phone.

"You have forty-eight hours. Quit, pack, leave, and nobody ever sees this."

"And if I don't?"

"Then everybody sees it." She smiled. "The board. The staff. The press. Your little friend in pastry."

"'Disinherited daughter seduces the CEO to get her company back.' It writes itself."

"That's not what happened."

"It's what it looks like," said Danielle. "Nobody cares what happened."

She turned and went back up the stairs.

At the top she looked back.

"Forty-eight hours, sweetie. I'll know if you're still here. I always know."

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay in cottage three and thought about New York.

My little apartment, my old boss, the hotel on Park Avenue.

Nobody there had ever seen me kneel.