The Mistress in the Room novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Marble Bench

I did not make pancakes the next morning.

I made them anyway, because Hannah and Seth came through the new front door at nine with their eyes swollen.

Seth ate six.

Hannah ate none, and then she took one off my plate and ate that.

"Dad called nine times," she said.

"Did you pick up?"

"No." She looked at her hands. "He left a voicemail. He said you were having an episode."

"I'm not having an episode."

"I know." She finally looked up. "I watched you take the microphone."

I rinsed the plates with my back to her.

"I'm going to his office," I said. "You don't have to come."

"Mom."

"The building is mine. I want him to hear it from me."

The building was my mother's.

Her family had owned the brick tower on Wabash for eighty years, and when Douglas started his brokerage, I leased him two floors at half the market rate and put it in my own name.

He had never asked who signed the lease.

I drove downtown alone.

The lobby was full of the Monday crowd, and the guard at the front desk straightened up when he saw me.

"Mrs. Lindahl."

"Good morning. I need the lobby for five minutes."

Douglas's whole office staff was coming through the turnstiles with coffee cups.

A woman from accounting saw me and slowed down.

Then two of the account managers came in together, and I recognized the face of the man who had laughed loudest on the tape from Boston.

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