I Signed Away Eight Million to Leave Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Nothing More

I tell the cameras the truth, turn down his uncle's ride, and land on my best friend's couch, until the woman who took my fiance takes credit for my work.

The cameras surged toward the gate.

"Neve! Neve, over here!"

"Is it true you asked for eight million?"

"Did you sign an NDA?"

"How does it feel to lose him to Margaux Lorillard?"

The rain was getting heavier. My suitcase wheel had a stone stuck in it.

I could have put my head down and walked.

That's what they wanted. A girl with her head down makes a better photo.

I stopped in the middle of the road and let them come.

A man shoved a microphone at my chin.

"Did you demand eight million dollars to leave quietly?"

"No," I said. "I signed away eight million dollars an hour ago."

The noise dropped a little.

"I didn't read it. I didn't ask a question. I gave it all back and left my ring on the paper."

"Then where's the story coming from?"

I looked past him, up the drive, at the big white house.

"Ask Honora Fitzroy," I said. "She has the paper. My signature's on it twice."

Then I bumped my suitcase over the curb and kept walking.

They followed me for half a block before they gave up.

A long black car slid up beside me and stopped.

The back window came down.

Corbin Fitzroy looked out at me, his reading glasses pushed up into his hair.

He was thirty-five and looked like he hadn't slept.

"The train station's full of photographers too," he said. "Get in, Neve."

"No."

"It's raining."

"I noticed."

He waited.

"I wrote one sentence this morning," I said. "Nothing more to do with this family. You're this family."

"Half of it."

"Which half?"

"The half that didn't clap."

That almost got a laugh out of me. I didn't let it.

He reached down and passed a black umbrella out through the window, handle first.

"Then take this, at least. It's not a Fitzroy umbrella. I bought it at a gas station."

I took it.

"Thank you," I said.

"You were right about the ceiling," he said. "I signed every invoice. I know whose room that is."

The window went up before I could answer.

The car pulled away and turned left, back toward the city, not the house.

I took the train to Brooklyn with a hood up and the umbrella dripping on my shoes.

Ivy Kiley opened her door before I knocked.

She'd been watching from the fourth-floor window.

She grabbed me by both shoulders and looked at my face for a long second.

"You didn't cry," she said.

"Not in front of them."

"Good. You can do it on my couch." She pulled me in. "Meatball, move."

Her fat orange cat did not move.

Ivy took the suitcase and shoved the cat over herself.

The green couch had the same lump in the middle it had in college.

I sat on the lump.

Ivy put a beer in my hand and a bag of frozen peas on my head for no reason.

"For the swelling," she said.

"Nothing's swollen."

"Your pride. Sit still."

She'd already seen the clip of me at the gate. Everyone had.

She played it on her phone, twice, and cheered at the part about the paper.

Then she put the phone down and stared at me.

"Wait. You actually signed it back? All of it?"

"All of it."

"Eight million dollars, Neve."

"I know how much it was."

"I make eleven dollars an hour plus whatever drunk finance guys feel like tipping!"

"I didn't want their money."

"I would have taken their money. I would have taken their money and their silverware."

"Honora wanted it counted."

Ivy made a noise.

I told her everything. The stage. The amicable breakup. The ceiling.

When I got to "Margaux, for designing this beautiful room," she threw a pillow at the wall.

"She can't draw a straight line," Ivy said. "I've seen her stories. She uses a ruler for her eyebrows."

I laughed for the first time in two days.

It hurt a little.

"So what now?" Ivy asked.

I'd been thinking about it since the train.

"Now I work," I said. "Gorman Interiors. My name on the door."

"What door?"

"I'll find a door."

I opened my laptop on my knees to start a portfolio.

Every project from four years was there.

The ballroom. The lobby in Stamford. The rooftop bar in Boston.

Every one of them was labeled "Fitzroy Design."

My name wasn't in a single caption.

Not one client had ever been told who drew the room.

I sat with the laptop for a long time.

Ivy saw my face and quietly took the peas back.

At eleven that night her phone lit up on the coffee table.

She read it and went very still.

"Don't look," she said.

I took the phone out of her hand.

It was Margaux's account.

A video of the ballroom, slow, from the floor to the medallion, with soft piano music over it.

"My dream project, finally revealed," the caption said. "Eighteen months of love."

It had two million views.

Under it, a news post was going around with it, already shared ten thousand times.

The Sea Cliff, the old hotel on the cliffs in Newport, was reopening in June.

And the woman restoring it would be Margaux Lorillard.

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