I Lost To His E-Cup Mistress novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Collect by Friday

Lacey brings coffee and a hairbrush and begs Joanna to go back for a week; Joanna says no and names the $400,000 she wants back. At the loading dock a stranger is carrying her grandmother's chest out: Preston's brother, who was told to be dead.

I tried to lift the cedar chest and got it two inches off the cart.

It weighed as much as my grandmother's whole kitchen.

The doorman hurried over, then stopped, with his cap still in his hands.

"Mrs. Aldane the elder said nobody was to carry anything out until Friday, ma'am."

"Did she say why?"

"She said the family would send someone."

I left the chest where it was.

I took two of the garbage bags, because those I could carry, and I got into the first cab on Fifth.

I didn't give Preston's address.

I gave the stage door of the Gramercy Theatre, where I had hemmed costumes for nine years.

The foreman let me in without a single question.

He pointed at the daybed behind the rack of Act Two petticoats, and he put a kettle on.

I slept in my blouse with my trousers still on.

At 6:10 the next morning, somebody knocked on the shop door with her foot.

It was Lacey.

She stood there in an oversized cardigan with paint under her fingernails, carrying two coffees and a paper bag.

She was so out of breath that the lids on the cups were fogged.

"I went to the penthouse first," she said. "They wouldn't tell me anything. Oh, Jo."

She set the coffees down and put her arms around me.

She smelled like turpentine and her good shampoo, the way she had since she was fourteen.

I had paid for that shampoo for fourteen years.

I didn't mind.

She pulled a hairbrush out of the paper bag and sat me on the daybed.

"You didn't eat anything yesterday, did you?"

"I had cake."

"That doesn't count."

She started brushing my hair, slowly, from the ends up.

It was what she had done after our mother's funeral, when I was twenty and she was seventeen and our grandmother couldn't get out of bed.

"The Row Report put it up at one o'clock," she said, and she kept her voice very gentle. "Don't read it."

Of course I read it.

The headline said, THE FLAT WIFE FLEES, with a picture of my back going down the ballroom aisle.

Under it were eleven thousand comments.

The top one said, Honestly she should've left at the first E-cup.

Lacey took the phone out of my hand and turned it face down on the daybed.

"He's a coward, Jo. You know that. He gets scared and he does stupid things."

"He filmed it."

"I know."

"He started recording nine minutes before she stood up."

Lacey's hand stopped on my hair for half a second.

Then it moved again.

"Go back," she said. "Just for a week. Let him grovel in his own kitchen. Make him cry on the floor, and don't sign anything."

"No."

"Jo."

"No," I said. "I'm not going back to that apartment, and I'm not going to a kitchen where his mother changed the lock."

"It's your marriage."

"It was my marriage until yesterday."

She was quiet.

Then she put the brush down and rubbed my back in small circles.

"Okay. Okay. You can stay with me. I'll make the pull-out up."

"Not yet."

"Why not?"

I didn't have an answer that wouldn't hurt her.

Her loft was the first place Preston would look.

"I want the four hundred thousand," I said instead.

Lacey blinked at me.

"Grandma's money?"

"It went into his first building. It's mine. I want it back, and I want my name taken off every piece of paper with his on it."

"Jo, that's years of..." She stopped. "Okay. I'll help you. Whatever you need."

She kissed the top of my head, and she took the empty cups with her when she left.

I stood at the shop window and watched her walk to the corner and wave without turning around.

I watched until she was gone.

At eight o'clock I went back to Fifth Avenue for the chest.

The doorman wasn't at the front desk.

The luggage cart was gone from the lobby.

The cedar chest was gone with it.

I ran around the side of the building to the service entrance, where the trash bins stand.

A man was backing out of the loading door with the chest on a hand truck.

He was very tall, with a canvas work jacket and a short beard going grey at the corners.

He had it strapped down already, with two ratchet straps and a folded moving blanket underneath.

"Hey," I said. "That's mine."

"I know," he said.

His voice was low and dry, and he didn't stop pulling.

"There's a note on it that says collect by Friday. I'm collecting. Are you Joanna?"

"Who are you?"

He set the hand truck down and wiped his palm on his jeans, and then he held it out.

"Rafe Aldane. I'm Preston's brother."

Preston had never told me he had a brother.

He looked at the ring finger on my left hand, which was bare and pale.

"He told everyone I was dead," he said.

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