My Billionaire Brother Destroyed My Cheating Ex Husband novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Black Car
Alasdair and Elias reach her in under an hour. Six years of silence comes out in the car, the video hits two million views and her school puts her on leave. She decides to take her mother's piano out of the Lyle house in front of Chad.
"Where are you?" my brother asked.
It was the first question he'd asked me in six years.
I told him the gas station and the cross street.
"Stay under the lights," Alasdair said. "Forty minutes."
He hung up before I could say anything else.
I waited by the air pump with my arms wrapped around myself, and I didn't cry.
It took thirty-five minutes.
A black SUV pulled in beside my car, and the back door opened before it stopped.
Alasdair got out in a dark suit with his tie pulled loose.
He was thirty-four now, and he'd cut his hair shorter.
He took off his suit jacket and put it around my shoulders without a word.
It smelled like the cedar soap he'd used since college.
"You've got no bag," he said.
"I've got eleven dollars."
"Elias, have somebody pick up her car," he said.
The man behind the wheel got out.
Elias Kingslake had been at our kitchen table half of my teenage years, Alasdair's roommate and then his best friend.
He had taught me to drive stick in our mother's old Honda.
He was broader now, and gray had come in at his temples.
"Hi, Rochelle," he said, and held out his hand for my keys.
He gave them to a man from a second car I hadn't noticed pulling in.
Alasdair put me in the back seat and climbed in beside me.
For ten minutes nobody said anything.
The city lights came up, and I looked at the back of my brother's hand on the seat.
"You told me not to come crying," I said.
"I said a lot of things."
"You said marry him and don't come back."
"And you said you were done with me." His voice stayed flat. "You were twenty-three, Shelly. You meant it."
"I meant it for a night."
"It lasted six years."
That was when I lost it.
"Mom was dying," I said. "I called you from the hospital. I called you for two days, and you didn't come to her funeral."
Alasdair went very still.
In the rearview mirror, Elias's eyes found his.
"Alasdair," Elias said quietly.
"Not tonight," Alasdair said.
"That's not an answer."
"I know."
He turned his face to the window, and I turned mine to the other one.
We rode the rest of the way like that.
His building was on the river, and his apartment took up the top floor.
Elias held the elevator.
My knees went out as I stepped in, and a hand closed on my elbow and kept me up.
Then the hand let go, fast, and Elias stepped back against the far wall.
"Sorry," he said. "Alasdair's rule, and mine. I don't touch you while you're married and under this roof."
"Why?"
"So nobody can ever say I took advantage of a bad night."
"It's his rule," Alasdair said, without looking over. "I just agreed to it."
I almost smiled.
The guest room had its own bathroom and a closet full of tags still on the clothes.
I sat on the bed with Alasdair's jacket still around me and turned on my phone.
It had forty-one notifications.
The first was a post from my mother-in-law's page, and the video under it had two million views.
It started at my joke about the driver's license.
It ended on Poppy crying with her hands over her face.
It didn't have my reading the text out loud. It didn't have any of the rest.
The caption said: "My son's wife mocked a girl with no family in front of everyone. I have never been so ashamed."
Under it, thousands of strangers had called me cruel, and one of them had found my school.
The second thing was an email from Brookside Elementary.
The principal had put me on paid leave, effective tonight, "pending review of public conduct."
I read it twice.
Alasdair knocked once and came in without waiting.
He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
"Name what you want done to him," he said.
"Anything you want. I can make it happen by the end of the week."
I thought of the ring I'd left beside Chad's plate, and of him telling forty people to let me go.
"Nothing yet," I said.
"Rochelle."
"Tomorrow morning I'm going back to that house to get Mom's piano, and he's going to stand there and watch me take it."
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