Love After Layoffs novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Third Night

Brooks was waiting in the corridor outside the powder room with a folded paper in his hand.

I walked straight into his chest and stayed there.

"What did she say?" he asked into my hair.

"That she's finished, and so is her father's pin."

I decided to tell him about the house later.

I wanted one evening where nobody else was in the room.

He pulled back and held the paper out.

"Read it."

It was a letter on Ketterman Holdings letterhead, one paragraph long, signed by him in black ink.

It said that Brooks Ketterman renounced the six percent block of company shares.

His grandfather had held it in trust for the day he married a Scaife.

It said the block would go to the fund that paid back wages to the three hundred people whose jobs he had suspended and saved.

It said the transfer was final and could not be undone.

I read it twice.

"Those shares are worth thirty million dollars," I said.

"Thirty-one."

"Brooks."

"My grandfather held them over me for a wedding I never agreed to."

"I hid behind Hale for two years while people like you carried boxes out of this tower."

He took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"I wanted to pay for it with something that hurts."

"This hurts?"

"Like a tooth."

I laughed, and then I was crying, standing in a corridor of the fifty-first floor with half the board walking past.

"Janine."

"Yes," I said.

"I haven't asked anything."

"Ask it."

He looked down the hallway at the people watching and he did not lower his voice.

"Come home with me tonight and tomorrow night and every night after, in front of anyone who wants to look."

"Be mine out loud."

"Yes," I said, loud enough for the finance chief to hear it.

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