Betrayed by My Husband, Taken by His Billionaire Uncle novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Locked Out

Juliet comes home to her clothes on the curb and Davina in her robe, walks in anyway to take her mother's quilt, sleeps at the shop, and wakes to a thirty-day eviction notice on the door.

I stood there with my key still jammed in the van door.

"That Friday," I said.

"August twenty-ninth. You can check the date on your ring." He glanced at my bare finger. "Or the coffee."

"You knew. You knew at my wedding."

"I wasn't at your wedding."

"That's not an answer."

"No." He put his hands in the pockets of his white coat. "I didn't know you were real until an hour ago. To me you were a name on a seating chart I threw away."

I got the key out, turned it the right way and climbed in.

He didn't try to stop me.

I drove to Queens Road West because I didn't know where else my body was supposed to go at four in the afternoon.

The white brick Colonial looked exactly like the Christmas card we'd sent out last year, the one Chandler made me reshoot three times.

I punched in the gate code.

The little light blinked red.

I punched it in again, slower, my mother's birthday, the code Chandler set himself.

Red.

Then I saw the curb.

Six black lawn bags sat in a row by the mailbox, the heavy kind for yard waste.

A man across the street stopped watering his boxwoods and took out his phone.

I walked up the side path, past the trash cans, to the kitchen door.

Locked.

I went around to the front and rang my own doorbell.

Then the door opened, and Davina Lawson leaned on the frame in my robe.

My white waffle robe, the one Annabeth gave me for my birthday, belted tight and hanging short on her long legs.

Her phone was already up.

"Oh, Jules." She sounded sorry for me the way people sound sorry for a dog in the rain. "He said you might come by. Your stuff's on the curb."

"That's my robe."

"Is it?" She looked down at herself. "It was on the hook."

"Take it off or step aside. Either one."

She laughed and didn't move.

I didn't wait for her to choose.

I walked straight past her shoulder into the front hall.

I took the stairs two at a time.

In our bedroom, his side of the bed was rumpled and mine was rumpled too.

I stood there one second longer than I should have.

Then I opened the cedar chest at the foot of the bed and took out my mother's quilt.

She made it the year I was born, blue and white squares, with one square in the corner stitched from her own wedding dress.

I folded it over my arm.

On the landing window sat the gardenia in its clay pot, the one she grew in the shop for nineteen years.

I picked it up with my free arm.

Davina was halfway up the stairs, filming.

"Chandler's going to call the police."

"Good," I said. "Tell them I took my dead mother's quilt and a plant. Tell them which robe you had on."

I walked down past her.

Out on the front walk the man with the boxwoods was still filming too, from across the street.

I lifted the gardenia at him.

He lowered the phone, embarrassed, and I loved him a little for it.

I loaded the lawn bags into the van myself.

The split one, with my green apron hanging out of it, I carried in my arms.

Bexley Flowers was dark when I got there.

I unlocked the green door, and the bell rang over my head the way it had my whole life.

I put the gardenia on the worktable, where my mother kept it.

In the back room, behind the walk-in cooler, there was a canvas cot she used to nap on during wedding season.

I spread the quilt on it and lay down in my clothes.

Then I let myself cry, hard and ugly, into my mother's wedding dress.

At nine the bell rang.

I sat up so fast the cot tipped.

"It's me, it's me, don't stab me with the clippers."

Annabeth came through the curtain with a large pepperoni pizza in one hand and an aluminum baseball bat in the other.

Her red curls were up in a ponytail so high it looked angry.

"You didn't answer me for five hours, Jules. Five. I texted you a picture of a onesie."

"I saw."

She sat down hard on an overturned bucket. "Start from the top. Slowly. I need to know exactly how many people I'm hitting."

So I told her.

The exam, the follicles on the screen, the donor file, the hand on Davina's stomach, the ring in the coffee.

She didn't say one word the whole time.

When I got to the uncle, she put the bat across her knees.

"The sperm-bank king? The one who didn't come to your wedding?"

"He saw everything. He's the one who found it."

"Was he hot?"

"Annabeth."

"I'm asking for the case file."

I took a slice of pizza so I wouldn't have to answer.

She slept on the floor beside the cot on a pile of burlap sacks, with the bat next to her.

At dawn I heard tape.

A long strip pulled off a roll, the hard rip of it, right outside.

I went through the dark shop in my socks and opened the green door.

The bell rang.

A white sheet of paper was taped to the glass at eye level, with the Radford Properties logo across the top.

NOTICE OF TERMINATION OF MONTH-TO-MONTH TENANCY.

Thirty days.

At the bottom, in blue ink, was my husband's signature.

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