Marriage Offered, Love Declined novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: A Cashier's Check

Olivia hands the lender his check herself and reads his fees aloud in front of his staff, then learns Sebastian's uncle has been asking about the bride.

Lyle Brockway's office was above a check-cashing store on Kensington Avenue.

The stairs smelled like cigarettes and the carpet was the color of old gum.

He had four staff at four desks, all of whom stopped typing when we came in.

Brockway himself stood up behind a desk with a bowl of mints on it.

He was a heavy man in a shiny grey suit, with a comb-over and a gold ring on his little finger.

"Miss Dacey," he said. "Or it is Mrs. Crewe now, is it? Congratulations, I hear. Very fast."

"Dacey is fine."

"Mr. Crewe."

He held out a hand, and Sebastian looked at it until Brockway put it back in his pocket.

"Please, sit."

"We'll stand," I said.

Sebastian took the cashier's check from his inside pocket and handed it to me.

I held it for a moment.

Two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars, in numbers I had never seen on one slip of paper.

On the memo line, in Sebastian's neat engineer's handwriting, it said: Marriage agreement advance.

I had noticed it in the car and told him to take it off.

He had said the bank wouldn't reissue it before five.

"It's what it is," he'd said.

I put the check on Brockway's desk, face up.

"Paid in full," I said.

"I want the satisfaction of the note on your letterhead, signed today, with your name printed under it."

"Of course, of course."

He picked up the check and read it, smiling.

"Before I do, there's the matter of the closing fees."

"There are no closing fees."

"There are, Miss Dacey. Paragraph nine."

He slid a sheet across the desk.

I had read my father's note forty times over the weekend.

I knew paragraph nine.

"Paragraph nine says a late fee of five percent applies after a missed payment," I said, loudly enough for the room.

"My father missed one, in March of last year, because he was in the hospital with a heart scare."

"Five percent of that payment is two hundred and eleven dollars."

The four staff stopped pretending to type.

"You've charged us nine thousand three hundred dollars," I said.

"Compound," said Brockway pleasantly.

"The note doesn't say compound."

"It says what it says."

"It says it right here."

I put my finger on the line.

"'Simple.' I'm reading it aloud so your whole office knows what they work for."

A woman at the nearest desk looked at her screen very hard.

Brockway's smile got thinner.

"Mr. Crewe," he said, turning, "perhaps you can explain to your wife how these things work."

"She's explaining it very well," Sebastian said.

He had not moved from beside the door.

He stood with his hands in his pockets, perfectly still, and watched me work.

I would think about that later, how he didn't step in, how he didn't even move closer.

"Two hundred and eleven dollars," I said. "I'll write you a personal check for it. Today."

"That's absurd."

"Then call the Pennsylvania attorney general's consumer line, and I'll give you the number while you dial."

Nobody in that office breathed.

Brockway laughed once, short and ugly.

Then he took a pen from his drawer and signed the satisfaction of the note.

He printed his name under it and shoved it across the desk.

I wrote my two hundred and eleven dollars on a deposit slip, tore it off, and handed it to the woman at the nearest desk.

"Please give him this," I said.

She took it.

I saw her mouth twitch before she hid it.

"Does he make a habit of this?" Sebastian asked her.

"Not usually in front of us," she said, very low.

Brockway put the check in his drawer and sat down heavily.

"That's some bride you've got, Mr. Crewe," he said. "Money doesn't buy manners."

Sebastian walked to the desk.

He didn't raise his voice. I had never heard him raise it.

"My wife was polite," he said. "I'd be far less so."

Brockway's face went the color of his suit.

I picked up the signed satisfaction and held it against my coat.

My hands were shaking again, but this time I didn't care who saw.

We were at the door when Brockway spoke behind us, in a voice with all the sweetness pulled out of it.

"Your uncle called me this morning," he said to Sebastian.

"Mr. Lowell Crewe. Very polite man."

"He asked me to ring him the minute you came in with money."

Sebastian stopped.

I felt him go still beside me, all the way down.

"Did you tell him?"

"I told him I'd see for myself," Brockway said.

He smiled.

"He's stopping by your house tonight, to congratulate the bride. He said not to warn you."

On the desk, behind the mint bowl, one of the staff was holding up a phone.

She wasn't looking at me.

She was looking at the check.

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