My Marriage Was Their Bet novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Kitty's Debt

The club was called the Velvet Room, and it sat under a tire shop on the west side.

Kitty was waiting for us at the curb with a duffel bag, shaking in a thin jacket.

"He's inside," she said. "He's counting me."

"Let him count," I said.

Behind me the other women got out of the van, one at a time.

The first woman came first, in her good coat.

The woman from year four came next, and then year five, year six and the rest.

Nine women stood on the sidewalk in the cold, each with a white envelope held against her chest.

Samson had given them each their last payment in cash.

Not one of them had spent it.

"We pooled it in the van," the first woman said. "Forty-one thousand and change. It's what she owes."

I looked at Kitty.

"I'm paying it back," Kitty said fiercely. "I swear I'll pay every one of you back."

"You'll cook for us," said the woman from year nine. "Sunday dinners. That's the terms."

Kitty burst into tears and laughed at the same time.

I took her hand.

"Come on," I said.

Samson stayed in the van with the engine running.

This one was mine, and he had understood that without being told.

The doorman looked at ten women in line and stepped aside, because he couldn't think what else to do.

Inside, the music was loud and the room was half full of men at small tables.

The owner sat at the end of the bar in a leather jacket with a ledger of his own.

He was a thick, bald man with rings on every finger.

When he saw Kitty, he smiled with half his mouth.

"There she is," he said. "I'd about given up. Mr. Stockbridge said you'd come back on your own."

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