The Heiress Who Refused the Family Key novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Locks
Rafe drives Cecelia home, the locks are changed and Preston's boxes go into the hall, Preston threatens that people remember who looked crazy, and Danielle's edited video of the bride 'losing it' is already everywhere.
Rafe's truck was parked in the loading zone behind the Harbor Club.
He opened the passenger door and waited while I gathered my skirt.
I got in with sixty yards of tulle and sat there shaking.
He started the engine and didn't ask where I wanted to go.
"Charlestown," I said. "The apartment."
"It was on the invitation," he said.
He pulled out into traffic.
He had driven me to my first apartment, seven years ago, with all my boxes in the back, when I left the house in Brookline.
He had carried the boxes up three flights of stairs and left without a word.
I looked out the window.
"Danielle said something to me at the door," I said.
"I saw."
"She said I should have taken the key."
His hands tightened on the wheel.
Nobody outside my father's house was supposed to know what the key was.
My father had put it on the dining table the week after my mother's funeral, a brass key on a green felt cloth.
The house, the office, the signature on every family account.
Everything he owned.
I had pushed it back across the table and gone upstairs to pack.
"Who did you tell?" I asked.
"Nobody."
"Rafe."
"Nobody, Cecelia." He kept his eyes on the road. "The safe is in my care. The key is in the safe. Your father knows. I know. That's the whole list."
"Then how does Danielle Lorring know?"
He didn't answer for the length of a red light.
"I don't know," he said. "But I'm going to find out."
I wanted to say, You work for my father.
I didn't say it.
I turned my head and watched Boston go by in the window, the lights coming on in the late afternoon.
Hannah's car was already outside the apartment when we pulled up.
She had a duffel bag, a roll of packing tape and a very hard face.
"Okay," she said. "Which of us gets to throw his things in the street?"
"I'll do it," I said. "Take the boxes. Rafe, I need the locks changed."
"Give me an hour."
He went down to his truck and came back with a toolbox.
Upstairs, I pulled off the veil, and Hannah cut the back of the dress with a pair of kitchen scissors so I could step out of it.
I put on jeans and an old hospital sweatshirt.
It was the first time all day I could breathe.
Preston owned four suits, two pairs of running shoes, a golf bag and a framed print of the Yale campus.
Hannah packed them fast, with the efficiency of someone who works nights in an emergency room.
By the time Rafe had the new deadbolt in, the hallway was lined with boxes.
At seven o'clock, someone knocked.
"Cece?"
It was Preston.
He had changed out of the morning suit into jeans and a quarter-zip, and he'd obviously been drinking since the Club.
Rafe opened the door.
He didn't say anything.
He just stood in it.
Preston looked up at him and took a step back.
"I want to talk to my fiancée."
"She's not your fiancée," Rafe said.
"Cece, come on." Preston leaned sideways to find me. "You made your point. You humiliated me in front of my boss. Fine. We're even. Now can we please just be adults?"
I came to the door and stood behind Rafe's shoulder.
"Your boxes are in the hall," I said.
"You're throwing me out? Over a signature?"
"Over a marriage."
"It's not a real marriage, Cece, it's a joke. Danielle says it can be annulled." He tried to smile. "You know how dramatic you get. This is exactly why I never told you things. You blow everything up."
Hannah laughed out loud behind me.
"Say that again," she said, holding up her phone. "I'm recording."
Preston looked at the phone and his face closed.
"You people are enjoying this."
"A little," said Hannah.
"You'll regret this. Nobody's going to believe you. It's a nurse's word against a man who's been with his firm for seven years. And Danielle is going to tell everyone you took a tantrum at your own wedding."
"I read a document and played a recording," I said. "In front of a hundred and eighty people."
"People forget that part," Preston said. "They remember who looked crazy."
He turned and took the stairs two at a time.
Rafe closed the door and slid the new deadbolt home.
His hand stayed on it a second longer than it needed to.
"He means it," he said. "He's going to try."
"Try what?"
Hannah's phone buzzed in her hand.
She looked at it.
Then she turned the screen toward me.
It was a video, forty seconds long, from the third row.
It showed me at the altar with my mouth open and my arm in the air.
There was no sound on it, and no certificate.
Across the top, someone had written in big white letters: "BRIDE LOSES IT AT HER OWN WEDDING."
It had four hundred thousand views.
The account that posted it first was Danielle's.
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