My Best Friend Ripped Off My Veil, So I Took Back Every Dollar novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Bags on the Lawn

Her things are in garbage bags on the lawn and Melanie answers the door in her robe; Shane arrives with proof of the wire.

Annette drove, because my hands wouldn't hold the wheel.

I sat in the passenger seat in my wedding dress with the skirt bunched up to my knees and looked at the bank alert until the screen went dark.

"Say something," Annette said.

"Thursday," I said. "He did it Thursday. He sat at my kitchen table on Thursday night and ate the lasagna I made."

"Then he's an even bigger coward than I thought."

I laughed once, and it hurt.

The house was twelve minutes from the lodge, in a cul-de-sac of tan houses with young maples out front.

We had closed on it in March. Both our names were on the deed, and my own savings were the down payment. My father's insurance had stayed in the joint account for everything after.

I saw the lawn before I saw anything else.

Garbage bags lay in a heap on the grass, black and bulging, and the one on top had split.

A pair of my scrubs hung out of it, and a shoe, and the spine of a photo album.

My winter coat lay on the wet grass with the sleeves spread.

"Oh, he did not," Annette said.

The neighbors had come out onto their porches.

The woman from next door stood at her mailbox with her phone held up, filming my pile of clothes.

"He had two men out here at noon," she called. "I thought you knew, honey."

"I didn't," I said.

I got out of the car in my dress and started carrying bags to Annette's trunk.

Every bag I lifted was heavier than I expected, because somebody had packed my books and my mother's china in with my sweaters.

Whoever had done it hadn't cared what broke.

The front door had a new lock, a black keypad I had never seen.

I punched in my father's birthday, which had opened every door in this house for five months.

It gave me three red lights and a long, flat beep.

I did it again, in case I had been wrong.

The red lights came on again.

A car turned into the cul-de-sac behind me.

I knew it by the sound of the engine, a small white hybrid with a dented bumper.

I had been in the passenger seat the day she backed it into a mailbox.

Melanie parked at the curb and got out, and she had taken her bridesmaid shoes off and put on sneakers.

"I changed the code on Wednesday," she said. "Dalton asked me to. He doesn't know how."

She said it so plainly.

Annette put down the bag she was holding and straightened up beside me.

"You changed it," I said.

"I have a key." Melanie held it up, a small brass one on a ring that I knew, with a little silver star I had bought her for her birthday. "He gave me one in January."

The neighbors had stopped pretending not to listen.

"Why?" I asked.

I did not mean why the key. I meant why any of it.

Melanie put her hand on the front of her loose dress and flattened the fabric against her stomach.

There was a small, firm curve under it.

"Because I'm three months pregnant," she said. "It's Dalton's."

Somebody on a porch said, "Oh my God," very quietly.

I looked at her hand.

It was resting where it had rested all morning, on the front of her dress, and I had thought she was nervous.

"How long?" I asked.

"It's been three years," Melanie said. "I tried to tell you a hundred times, Holly. You never wanted to hear anything that wasn't about the wedding."

She was crying a little, and she sounded sorry, and she was still standing on the porch of the house I had paid for, with my friend's key in her fist.

"Open the garage," I said.

"I can't, it's his house now."

"It has my name on the deed, and my father's tackle box and his watch are in that garage. Open it."

She looked at the neighbors, and for the first time all day she looked unsure.

She pressed the keypad, and the garage door ground upward.

I walked in past the lawn mower and the stacked boxes of our wedding favors.

On the shelf over the workbench was a green metal tackle box with my father's initials burned into the lid.

Next to it, in a coffee tin, was the watch he had worn for thirty years.

I took them both.

I walked back out into the evening light with the box under one arm and the watch in my fist.

"I'm Holly Penland," I said, loud enough for the porches. "My name is on this deed. Remember that when someone asks you whose lawn this is."

It was the first thing I had done all day that felt like mine.

A green pickup turned into the cul-de-sac and stopped across the end of the driveway.

Shane Ferris got out of the truck, still in his wedding suit, with his tie pulled loose and a paper folded in one hand.

He didn't look at Melanie.

He looked at me.

"I need to show you something," he said. "He moved your money Thursday. I saw the wire."

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