Chapter 5: Rodrigo's POV

Rodrigo's POV

By the time the soup came, three men on my board had sent the bakery video to each other and pretended I couldn't see.

It was the monthly dinner at the club, twelve of us around a long table, and I had planned to talk about the port contract.

Instead the chairman of the audit committee stood up with his glass and said, "Gentlemen, I propose a game."

He pulled ten white envelopes out of his jacket.

He had sealed them with candle wax.

He set them in front of my plate, and the whole table laughed.

"Pick one, Rodrigo," he said.

I picked up my fork and said, "Sit down."

Nobody sat.

I smiled the way my father had taught me to smile when a room turned, and I waited it out.

The chairman finally laughed and put the envelopes away.

I did not eat the soup.

In the car afterward I looked down at the paused clip.

I had watched it all day.

Every time I got to the card, the one that said Pay your daughter, I stopped it, and then I started it again as if it would say something else.

It was a hundred dollars.

A hundred dollars a week, for formula and diapers and a pediatrician, and until that morning I had never once asked what a week cost.

My phone lit up.

Mamá.

"Come to the house," my mother said. "Now. We need to discuss the statement."

She was at her desk when I got there, in the study that had been my father's.

Her reading glasses hung from the chain she had worn since his funeral.

On the screen in front of her was a draft in her own wording.

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Cruel Allowance Game Cost Him His Wife and Heir from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.