His Test Cost Him a Wife, Not a Negotiation novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Spare Key

Winslow and Rosalind let themselves in with a spare key as Dorinda packs; she returns every key and cancels the wedding, then learns Eleanor has claimed her half of the refunds.

Early the next morning I stuffed the last sweater into my suitcase.

Four years of my life, and everything that was truly mine fit into two bags.

I left the jewelry Winslow had bought me on the dresser.

I left the gowns his mother had ordered for me, and the coat I had never liked.

I was zipping the second suitcase when the front lock turned.

Winslow pushed the door open, and Rosalind came in behind him.

He still had his spare key.

Rosalind walked a slow circle around the suitcases.

"Well," she said. "Quite the performance."

She tapped a wheel with the toe of her shoe.

"Winslow, I'll give her three days. Then she comes crawling back."

Winslow frowned at me and said nothing.

Rosalind smiled at him. "You don't believe me? Offer her this apartment right now. She'll unpack those bags and hang everything back in the closet."

I ignored her.

I took my passport and my documents off the table and put them in my purse.

"Where exactly are you going?" Winslow asked.

I snapped the clasp. "Where I'm supposed to be."

"Hear that?" Rosalind said to him, bright and certain. "She won't give you an address. It's on purpose. She wants you anxious, chasing her."

"The second you soften, she's back in control."

Winslow had started to step toward me.

When she finished, he stopped.

I looked at him, and the last wish to explain myself went out of me.

I took an envelope from the kitchen drawer and held it out to him.

"Everything's in there. The key to this apartment, the key card for your mother's house on Beacon Hill, and the key to the Cape Cod house."

Rosalind snatched it before he could take it.

She tipped the keys into her palm and held up the apartment key.

"I told you," she said to him. "She was never going to be satisfied with access."

"She can live here, but she doesn't own it. She can walk into your mother's house, but she isn't its lady. She can summer on the Cape with a key that can be taken back any time."

She turned to him, her eyes bright with it.

"You see? Her appetite is bigger than you ever imagined."

Winslow's face went cold.

Once again he had chosen the story Rosalind told about me.

"If you want this apartment, just say so," he said. His voice was tired and patient, and he said it like a favor. "I'll have my lawyer handle the transfer. Stop the theatrics."

I stared at him for a moment.

Then I took out my phone.

I opened my email and typed to the wedding planner, with Winslow and Rosalind both watching me do it.

"Please cancel the venue, the caterer, the band and the flowers for Saturday. Please refund every deposit I paid, forty-one thousand two hundred dollars, to my own account today."

I read it aloud so they would hear it.

Then I sent it.

Rosalind laughed, a small silvery laugh.

"Forty-one thousand," she said. "She's invoicing you, Winslow. She's doing it in front of you."

Winslow's jaw worked.

"Dorinda," he said. "Take the apartment. Take the money. Take whatever you want, and we'll talk about it after the weekend."

"I don't want anything," I said. "I want my forty-one thousand two hundred."

I picked up both suitcases.

Neither of them moved out of the way.

I walked between them and out into the hall.

At the curb the doorman carried the bags to my car for me and would not look me in the eye.

He had seen the video too.

I drove to Logan with my phone face down on the seat.

By the time I reached the terminal there was a text from Pearl.

"Dad saw it. He's not mad at you. He's very quiet. Call me."

I stood in the check-in line and read her message three times.

Then an email arrived from the wedding planner.

She was sorry, she wrote, but the venue and the caterer had both been paid out of one account, as Mrs. Eleanor Whitstable had insisted from the start.

I had wired my half into that account myself, because Eleanor wanted every vendor paid from one place.

The refunds would go to the payer of record.

That was Eleanor.

A second message came in under it, from a number I had saved as Winslow's mother.

Eleanor did not waste words.

"You were never owed a cent, Dorinda. Everything you paid us was a gift to our family."

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