They Vetoed My Wedding 5 Times I Vetoed Them for Life novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Sixty-One Thousand

The manager of Store Four was waiting at the loading dock at eight on Wednesday with a banker's box in her arms.

She was fifty, with a pencil behind her ear and a fleece vest that said Pruitt Home Supply on the chest.

She had stood at the back of the boardroom crowd on Monday, and she had not looked away either.

"Ms. Pruitt," she said. "I tried to give you this on Saturday."

"I was getting married on Saturday."

"I know. I came to the dock. Your brother's truck blocked the way."

"I'm sorry."

"No, you aren't. And I didn't come to be nice." She set the box on a pallet of fence posts. "For three years I've put Mr. Cal's receipts in the monthly packet and watched nobody check them."

I opened the lid.

The receipts were fastened with rubber bands, one stack for each month, and I knew my own handwriting on the monthly cover sheets.

I had signed them all.

I had never once read what they were.

The top receipt was from a steakhouse in Boston, for forty-one hundred dollars.

Under it were a fishing lodge in Montana and three payments on a truck that wasn't a company truck.

I turned them over one at a time, and the numbers went on and on, in the neat column I had trained myself to trust.

"How much?" I asked.

"Sixty-one thousand, four hundred, in three years."

I looked up.

Cal was standing at the end of the loading dock.

His hands were wrapped to the wrists in white gauze from the clinic.

He had come in his good shirt, with his key card clipped to his belt, and the whole yard had stopped working.

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