He Dumped Me at Our Rehearsal Dinner, So a Man Twice My Age Took Me Home novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: What the Check Said

"Good morning, Annabelle," Lauren said.

Nobody had called me Annabelle since the third grade.

I got out of the cab in a stranger's coat and stood at the bottom of the steps.

"I had the housekeeper pack what she could," she said.

She came down two steps and held out the check and a folded paper.

The check was for forty thousand dollars.

The paper was one page, typed.

It said that Annabelle Waters would never speak of her engagement to Whitaker Boykin, of October twenty-fourth, or of any Bellinger.

"Sign it," Lauren said, "and cash that, and we'll all go back to our lives."

"Is that what Whit wants?"

"Whit wants to be happy," Lauren said.

Up on the second floor a curtain moved.

Kinsley stood at the window in a white robe with a coffee mug in both hands.

She looked down at me with her mouth open a little.

When she saw me look, she let the curtain fall.

"Your video's very popular," I told Lauren.

Kinsley had filmed my walk out of the dining room last night on her phone and posted it before the dessert course.

By morning it had been watched four hundred thousand times.

Strangers wrote *the ring in the wine glass is the best thing I've ever seen* and *I'd have thrown it at her.*

"Savannah is a small town, dear," Lauren said. "People have long memories, and you have an aunt with a business on a marina."

"Savannah's smaller than you think," I said.

"Is it?"

"I've given tours of it every night for four years. I know where everyone is buried."

"I walk past your family every Tuesday at Bonaventure," I said. "Third row up from the river. It's a nice stone. The little one at the end is the sweetest."

Lauren's face went white around the mouth.

For a moment I thought she was going to be sick on the steps.

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