I Signed Away Eight Million to Leave Him novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Fall River

"Then you're the same man who stood on that stage," I told Brennan.

The porch door banged behind me.

Corbin came down the boards with his laptop still under his arm, and set it on the rail.

Brennan straightened up. For a second he looked about twelve.

"You heard her from your car," Corbin said. "Every word. The debts. The pearls. What she did to Neve, and to you."

"Stay out of this."

"I've stayed out of it for three years. I was in London. She sent me there so I'd stay out of it."

"You took my fiancee."

"You threw her off a stage in front of four hundred people," Corbin said. "I picked her up off the gravel. That's the order it happened in."

Brennan's hands closed into fists on the rail.

"You've seen her texts," Corbin said, quieter. "You've seen what she is. And you're going to stand at an altar and sell yourself to the Lorillards so she can keep a house that isn't even hers."

"She's my mother."

"She's my brother's widow. I loved him too. He'd be sick."

Brennan looked at him for a long moment.

Then he looked at me, standing between them.

"Don't come to the wedding, Neve," he said.

"I'm the designer. I'll be in the building."

He walked down the steps to his car and didn't look back.

Corbin put his forehead against my hair.

That night my mother called.

She never called after nine. She was always on her way to a shift.

"I've seen that man on the news more than I've seen my own daughter," she said. "Bring him to dinner on Saturday. He can bring a pie. Not a fancy one."

She hung up before I could say no.

On Saturday Corbin stood on the sidewalk in Fall River holding a blueberry pie from a gas station, still in the plastic.

He'd put on a white shirt and pressed khakis. He looked about to testify.

"You're nervous," I said.

"I run eleven hotels on two continents."

"You're sweating through your shirt."

"It's humid."

It wasn't humid.

A man with a camera was sitting in a parked car across the street. We'd stopped noticing them.

My mother's triple-decker was the same as ever. Three porches stacked up, the paint flaking, a plastic flamingo in the strip of grass.

I'd worn a blue cotton sundress. It was the only dress I owned that Honora hadn't picked.

My mother opened the door in her scrubs, with her reading glasses on a cord.

She looked at Corbin from his shoes to his gray temples.

"You're older than you look on TV," she said.

"Most people say the opposite, ma'am."

"Most people are polite." She took the pie and read the label. "Good. Come in."

Dinner was pot roast at the kitchen table with the wobbly leg.

My mother asked him everything.

His job. His mother. Why a grown man lived alone in a house that big. Whether he could cook.

"Eggs," Corbin said. "Toast. Chowder from a can."

"So no."

"So no."

She told him how I'd chipped my tooth. Eleven years old, street hockey, a puck to the face, and I'd finished the game.

"We won," I said.

"You lost by four."

"I won personally."

Corbin laughed so hard he had to put his fork down.

My mother watched him laugh. Something in her face eased.

Then she folded her hands on the table and stopped smiling.

"Seven years," she said. "She gave seven years to your family. She came home at Christmas looking like a ghost, and I never said anything, because she said she was happy. I'm saying it now."

"Ma."

"I'm talking to him. So what do you want with my daughter?"

Corbin didn't answer my mother.

He turned in his chair and answered me.

"I want to be the one who stays," he said. "Every night you'll have me. Every fight, every bad Christmas. I won't go upstairs to take a call. I won't go anywhere."

My throat had closed.

My mother looked at him for a long moment.

Then she stood up and started clearing plates.

"I work at eleven," she said. "There are clean sheets on her bed. The bed is from 2009. Be kind to it."

"Ma!"

"I'm a nurse, Neve. I've seen everything."

She kissed the top of my head on her way to the sink.

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