He Stole My Fiancée, So I Took His Wife and His Company novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Pearls and the Empty Account

Miles confronts Connor and Natalie in front of the whole office, learns the joint account was emptied, and the hospital declines his card for his mother's surgery deposit.

The nurse had called me because my mother's blood pressure spiked when she saw my face on the hospital TV.

Someone had posted the bridge video, and the local news had picked it up by noon.

"Man leaves fiancée mid-traffic," the caption said. Natalie had cried to the camera.

My mother was sitting up when I got there, gray under her silver hair, with her glasses on their chain.

"Sit," Joan said. "You look worse than I do."

I sat.

"Where's Natalie?"

"We're not getting married."

"Good."

I stared at her.

"She never once brought me a coffee in this ward," my mother said. "Not once in four months. Now tell me what that girl did."

I told her.

My mother listened with her eyes closed and her hand on mine.

When I got to Connor, she opened them.

"Connor Dunleavy ate at my table every Christmas for fourteen years."

"I know."

"He called me Mom."

"I know, Mom."

She patted my hand twice.

"Then you go in tomorrow and you look him in the face. Don't let them tell it for you."

I slept in the chair beside her bed.

At nine the next morning I walked into Kettering Dunleavy Realty with the marriage license folded in my jacket.

My name was on the door, and my face was on the lobby screen above the reception desk, frozen mid-step on the bridge.

Eleven agents stood around the coffee station.

They stopped talking when I came in.

Connor stepped out of his glass office with his sleeves rolled and his arms already open.

"Miles. Buddy. Thank God."

I did not move.

"Come here," he said. "You've been up all night. Whatever she said to you, we'll figure it out."

"I know who she was with, Connor."

He lowered his arms slowly.

"I saw you in the café lot."

The agents stared at the carpet.

A printer started, and nobody went to get the page.

Connor looked at me, and I watched him decide something.

"Okay," he said, quietly. "Not here. My office."

"Here."

"Miles."

"You told me you were ten minutes out." I kept my voice level. "You were fifty feet from me with your tongue in her mouth."

Somebody gasped.

Connor put a hand on my shoulder, and I shook it off.

"You're in shock," he said, loud enough for everyone. "You haven't slept. Take two weeks of leave. Paid. Nobody will think less of you."

"You're putting me on leave."

"I'm taking care of you."

"You're taking my chair."

The front door opened, and Natalie walked in.

She wore a cream dress and my grandmother's pearls, the ones I had given her the night I proposed.

She did not look at me.

She walked straight to Connor and fixed his collar with one finger.

"Everything okay, babe?"

The word went through the lobby faster than the printer.

Connor's jaw tightened, but he didn't step away.

"Babe," I said.

"Oh, don't look so shocked." Natalie turned to me, and the smile was back. "You told the whole bridge I was a liar. I figured I'd stop lying."

An agent by the window lifted her phone.

"Put it away," Connor snapped, and then softer to Natalie, "Not now."

"Why not now?" She stepped toward me. "You wanted to know who he was, Miles. He's right here."

"You're taking the pearls off," I said.

"They were a gift."

"They were my grandmother's. She didn't leave them for you."

"Then she should have put it in writing."

I took one step toward her, and Connor moved between us.

"That's enough. Security's downstairs. Don't make me use it."

The man I had asked to be my best man was threatening me with a guard.

I looked past him at the agents.

"Everyone here knows what happened," I said. "I'll be back for my desk."

I walked out with the whole lobby watching.

In the elevator, I opened the bank app on my phone to move money for my mother's deposit.

The surgery needed sixty thousand dollars paid by Friday, and I had been saving it in the joint account since spring.

The screen loaded.

Available balance: $41.18.

I refreshed it.

I scrolled through the history.

A transfer, two days ago. Sixty-two thousand dollars, to an account that wasn't mine.

The memo line said: Wedding.

I called the bank. I called the number on my debit card. I called Natalie, and it went to voicemail.

I rode the elevator all the way to the lobby and then back up to the lobby again.

I drove to St. Luke's with my hands shaking on the wheel.

At the billing desk on the third floor, a clerk smiled at me and pulled up my mother's file.

"The deposit's due Friday, Mr. Kettering. Would you like to pay today?"

I handed her my credit card.

She ran it once and looked up.

"I'm so sorry. It's been declined."

She ran it again.

Behind me, a woman's voice said, "Run mine."

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