Forgotten Groom in the Back Alley novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Safe Keeping

The chairman of Linden Freight's board lived in a brick house in Evanston with a rose garden in front.

I had written the letter by hand, on Hazel's good paper, and I carried it in my inside pocket.

Dot came with me, in her church coat, with a tin of lemon bars.

"Why a handwritten letter?" she asked, in the cab.

"A lawyer sends a letter that people can hide in a drawer. I want him to watch me hand this one over."

"Good," she said. "He's an old goat. He'll like the theatre."

The chairman opened the door himself, in a cardigan, and looked at Dot first.

"Dorothy."

"You've gotten fat."

"My wife says it's contentment."

"Your wife is a liar. Here are lemon bars."

He took the tin, laughed, and then looked at me, and the laugh went out of his face.

"Mr. Taggart," he said. "I wondered if you'd come."

We sat in a small study with a window onto the roses.

I gave him the letter.

He read it standing, with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.

It said that over six years I had paid one hundred and eighty thousand dollars into Yvette Hargrove's condo, in thirty-one transfers, and that she had called each of them a loan until we married.

I had attached the bank pages.

I had attached her texts, too, the ones from the file I'd given to HR.

Of course, love. A loan, until we're married. I'll never forget what you did.

"The company has no business in a private loan," the chairman said, at last.

"I know."

"Then why bring it to me?"

"Because the company filed a claim against me this morning." I kept my voice level. "It says I walked off with code I wrote myself. The man who signed it is the man whose name is on my work."

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