One Fateful Night with My Boss novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: What She Kept

I took the envelope out of my mother's hand and I did not look back.

She screamed my name down the walkway, and I drove away with her voice still going in my head.

Percy was asleep at Eugene Holloway's house, in a guest room with a moon lamp I had delivered myself.

That was the only reason I could do what I did next.

At midnight, I stood in the hallway of Nelson's building and pressed his buzzer until the door opened.

He was in grey sweatpants and a white T-shirt, with his hair a mess, and he looked at my face and stopped asking questions.

I put the envelope in his hand.

"Read it," I said.

He turned it over and went still.

He recognized his own printing, and I watched him recognize it.

Inside was a single folded sheet of hotel paper and a deposit slip from a bank.

The note was short.

"Francine. As agreed, for your mother's surgery, made out to her as you asked."

"I would like to see you again, and not for a price. Please call me. Nelson."

There was a cell number under his name.

"I never saw this," I said. "I knew the check would come. I never knew you wrote me anything."

"I mailed a cashier's check with that note," he said slowly. "Thirty-eight thousand dollars, to your mother, as we agreed. The Monday after the gala."

"I know. I'm looking at the slip."

"It cleared in four days. I called the bank, because I wanted to be sure it had arrived."

"You thought I took the money and was done with you."

"I thought you had what you needed and decided I wasn't worth a phone call."

He said it without self-pity, as a fact.

I sat down on the arm of his couch because my legs would not hold me.

"What else did my mother say?" I asked.

"She said you were grateful for the money, and you were back with your ex, and I shouldn't call again," he said.

"She cashed it, which was the point. She hid the note, and she told you I was done."

"Yes."

"And I spent six years thinking you hadn't cared enough to try."

His face changed.

He crossed the room and crouched in front of me, the way he had crouched in front of Percy.

"I tried," he said. "I'm not saying that to make it better. I drove to Loring Street in November."

"You did what?"

"I sat in the car outside your mother's house for twenty minutes. There was a light on in the kitchen."

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