The Stranger I Married novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Check

Judith Hartwell finds Maya in her lobby and offers $75,000 to disappear; Maya tears the check in front of the staff, and Judith learns whom Maya is engaged to.

The next morning I was on a ladder in the Hartwell lobby with a mouthful of floral wire when the temperature dropped.

I felt it before I saw her.

A woman in a black cashmere coat stood at the foot of the ladder with her hands folded over a leather bag.

Her silver hair was cut in a sharp line at her jaw, and her pearls were small, which in my experience means expensive.

"You're the florist," she said.

"I'm one of them." I took the wire out of my mouth. "I'm Maya."

"Judith Hartwell."

She didn't offer a hand.

The scaffolders on the far wall stopped working.

A housekeeper pushing a cart through the lobby slowed down to a crawl.

"Come down," Judith said. "I don't speak to people from below."

I climbed down.

She was shorter than me by four inches and I felt about two feet tall.

"My son told me last night," she said.

"He's a poor liar and a worse secret-keeper, and he told me in the kitchen like a boy who broke a window."

"That's between him and me."

"It's between you, him and a board of nine." She opened her bag. "So let's be adults about it."

She took out a check and held it between two fingers.

It was already made out, in blue ink, to Maya Ferris.

Seventy-five thousand dollars.

I read the number twice.

"This is for your trouble," Judith said.

"And for your discretion.

You finish this week's measurements, you invent a family emergency, and you go home to Joliet and marry your little lawyer."

"You know about Nolan."

"I know about everything."

She said it.

"My lawyers will file the papers in Nevada.

You'll sign them and say nothing to anyone until the spring.

Seventy-five thousand dollars for a ten-minute signature.

It's more than your chapel cost."

I laughed.

It came out strange and loud and bounced off the marble.

"Mrs. Hartwell, it cost seventy-five dollars. I still owe him the seventy-five."

Her face did not change.

I looked at the check.

Seventy-five thousand would pay off my lease, my mother's last bill and Carly's raise.

It would clear every red number on my wall.

It also had the smell of something that wanted to own me.

"No," I said.

"You haven't thought about it."

"I thought about it for one whole second, and it was a nice second."

I took the check in both hands.

Then I tore it down the middle, and again, and I let the pieces fall in the lobby.

They landed on the marble like confetti.

Behind me somebody gasped.

I turned and saw a half circle of staff.

There was the housekeeper, two scaffolders and a young doorman with both hands over his mouth.

"I don't take money to be quiet," I said, a little louder than I meant to.

"If I have something to say, I'll say it.

And if I want a divorce, your son will sign it on the fourteenth like he promised."

"He promised?"

Judith's eyes moved over my shoulder.

"Elias," she said.

I hadn't heard him come in.

He stood ten feet away with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.

He looked at the torn check on the floor.

He looked at me.

Then he did something I didn't expect.

He crossed the lobby, walked around his mother, and stood next to me, close enough that our sleeves touched.

"Mother," he said. "Her contract stands."

"Elias."

"She has been in this building two days and she has fixed more than the architect did in a year. Leave her alone."

"She's a stranger with a piece of paper."

"She's my wife."

The word dropped into the lobby.

The housekeeper's cart stopped.

The doorman's hands fell away from his mouth.

Judith Hartwell looked at her son for a long, quiet moment, and I saw the exact second the surprise turned to arithmetic.

"Your wife," she said softly. "How interesting."

"Mother..."

"She's engaged to Nolan Costanza."

Elias went absolutely still.

"Did you know that?" Judith asked him. "I assumed you did."

I felt him turn his head toward me.

"Maya?" he said, very low.

"I told you."

"You told me your fiance's name was Nolan."

"And?"

"Nolan Costanza is the alderman candidate my mother has paid for since March."

He said it in an undertone, only to me.

My stomach dropped through the floor.

"That's my fiance," I whispered.

Judith smiled for the first time, and it was worse than the frown.

"Thirty days, I think," she said, to nobody in particular. "That should be enough."

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