Chapter 12: The Envelope

I left the ballroom with my father's watch on my wrist and no coat.

Nobody stopped me.

Three hundred people were looking at the podium, and I walked through them.

I took a taxi home.

The driver asked if I was all right, and I said I was a paralegal, and he nodded.

Gran's kitchen was dark and smelled of the neighbors' pie.

I did not turn on the light.

I sat at the table in the emerald dress and took the brass washer off my finger.

I set it on the wood in front of me and looked at it.

It had cost eleven cents.

At one in the morning the front door opened and closed, and I heard the third stair take his weight and hold.

He stood in the kitchen doorway with his bow tie undone and the black jacket over his arm.

He had the envelope in his hand, the one from the courier, the seal still unbroken.

"Pen," he said.

"Don't."

"I'd like to explain."

"I'd like a lawyer," I said.

"I'd like forty of them."

He didn't move.

"You said you would tell me why after the house was mine."

"It isn't yours yet."

"No. It isn't."

"I asked you one thing," I said.

"No lies about anything that touches this street."

"I never lied about the street."

"You let me introduce you to my neighbors as a surveyor."

"I am a surveyor."

"You are the chairman of the company foreclosing on them!"

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Billionaire Husband Signed Away My Street from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.