They Called Me Barren, I Married a Billionaire novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Cushion

Mallory stood on my doormat with her hands in her coat pockets and waited to be told to leave.

I didn't tell her.

I stepped back, and she came in and stopped in the middle of the entry, small and gray in the early light.

The cat crossed the hall, looked at her, and walked away.

"That's the nicest thing anyone's done to me all week," she said.

Elias came out of the bedroom in a pair of sweatpants, with the pale scar across his ribs on full view and his hair standing up.

He took one look at her flat stomach and stopped.

"Kitchen," he said. "I'll make coffee. She talks first."

Mallory sat at the island and wrapped both hands around a mug she didn't drink from.

I stood across from her in his shirt and didn't offer her a chair or a kind word.

"Say it," I said.

"There's a trust." Her voice was thin. "Winston's grandfather set it up. It pays out when Winston, before his thirty-fourth birthday, has a child on the way, and a trustee sees it for himself."

"When is the birthday?"

"January seventeenth. The trustee is an old man who won't sign anything he hasn't looked at. Cordelia moved the Foundation's anniversary gala to the night before, so he'd be in the room."

"How much?" Elias asked.

"Forty million, to Winston. And the Foundation's building and its endowment follow it." She swallowed. "Cordelia has been running on that money for years."

I thought of six years of Sunday dinners.

I thought of Cordelia's hand on my wrist, patting it, saying maybe next month, darling.

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