My Marriage Was Their Bet novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Burner

Daphne confronts Samson in the garage, he catches her wrist and hands her a burner phone because Bancroft reads her bill, and Bancroft cancels her biggest contract; the first woman on the list answers and says all nine have waited ten years for her call.

Bea took Kitty upstairs, gave her a bath and a pair of pajamas, and told me to go and get answers.

I took the train downtown with the list folded in my fist.

Stockbridge MacKinnon Properties had twelve floors in a glass tower on the river.

Bancroft's name was first on the door.

I did not go up.

I went down to the parking garage, to the reserved space with Samson MacKinnon's name on a brass plate, and I waited.

He came out of the elevator at noon.

He saw me and stopped walking.

"You slept?" he said.

"No."

I held up the list.

"Why do you have nine women's phone numbers in your handwriting?"

"Because I asked each of them for it."

"Why?"

"I can't tell you yet."

I laughed, and it came out too loud in the concrete.

"You stood in my front hall for nine years, Samson, and talked to every one of them alone."

"Yes."

"What did you say to them?"

"I can't tell you that yet either."

I shoved the paper against his chest.

He caught my wrist before I could pull my hand back.

His grip was not hard.

His thumb rested on the inside of my wrist, right where my pulse was going, and neither of us moved.

I heard him swallow.

I told myself it was because I was shouting at him.

"Let go," I said.

He did.

He kept the list, folded it once and gave it back to me, and then he took a cheap black phone out of his coat pocket.

"Use this."

"I have a phone."

"Bancroft's office pays your bill. He reads every call, every text, every place it has been."

I stared at him.

"He told me that once," Samson said. "At the start. He thought it was funny."

I took the burner.

It was warm from his pocket.

"If I tell you the rest now," Samson said, "you'll go straight home and say it to his face. I know you. And then he'll bury every woman on that list before you finish your sentence."

"Bury them how?"

"The way he buries everything. He's very patient."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you today."

"Then why should I trust you?"

Samson looked at me for a long moment.

"You shouldn't," he said. "Not yet. Just call the first name."

My own phone started ringing in my purse.

It was Bea.

"Daph. The foundation's office just texted me. They've cancelled the luncheon. All forty tables."

That was my biggest contract of the year.

"Why?"

"Bancroft sits on their board. He called this morning."

I put the phone down and pressed the heel of my hand against my eye.

Bancroft had not even waited a day.

He had taken my business, my payroll and my name in front of a street full of neighbors, and he had done it while I was still sleeping.

Samson's jaw had gone tight.

"I can cover payroll," he said.

"No."

"Daphne."

"No. If I take your money, the next thing he says is that I left him for you." I looked up at him. "Did I?"

He did not answer right away.

"I think you left because he made you hold a stranger's hand and call it a gift," he said. "I think that was always going to be the last one."

"You think. You don't know."

"I've known for ten years that there'd be a last one," he said quietly. "I just didn't know which."

I did not understand that sentence.

I decided to hold on to it anyway.

My own phone buzzed again, and this time it was a text from Bancroft.

Bea's place, right? Fenner Street. Tell Kitty I said hello.

I had not told him where I was.

I had not told anyone but Bea.

"He's tracking it," I said.

"Yes," Samson said. "Leave that phone in your purse and never use it for anything that matters."

He stepped back and let me pass.

I took the burner and walked out of the garage into the cold.

On the sidewalk I stopped and opened the list.

The first name sat at the top in his neat slanting hand.

The woman from year one.

I remembered her.

She had cried in my kitchen on the day she left, and I had given her a coat.

I dialed.

It rang once.

"Took you long enough," a woman's voice said.

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"Daphne. It's you, isn't it?" She was almost laughing. "We've been waiting for this call for ten years."

I stood very still on the sidewalk.

"Who is we?"

"Ash Street diner, six o'clock tonight," the voice said. "Come alone. All of us will be there."

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