My Marriage Was Their Bet novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Napkin

Samson's POV

I left the boardroom, walked straight to the bank and asked for my box.

A week ago, in my bedroom, I had told her the napkin was hers.

She hadn't wanted it then.

After that vote I wanted it in her hand before the day was over.

The clerk took me down to the vault and set the long steel box on a table in a private room.

"Take your time, Mr. MacKinnon," she said, and shut the door.

I sat in front of it and did not open it.

I had not looked at the napkin in seven years.

The last time was year three.

I was thirty that year, and Daphne was twenty-seven.

I had gone to her kitchen with the napkin in my pocket, to put it in her hand.

She was icing a cake for a woman I had met in the hall that night.

I said, "Leave him."

She put the spatula down.

I said, "He made a bet on you, Daphne. All of us were at that table."

I never got to the nine signatures.

She slapped me so hard my ear rang.

"Never say a word against Bancroft in this house," she said.

Her hand was shaking, and her eyes were full.

I understood then that she knew part of it already.

She knew something was wrong with the way he loved her.

She had decided that if anyone said it out loud, she would have to leave.

She wasn't ready to.

I put the napkin back in my pocket, apologized and went out through the front hall.

That was all of it.

One slap, and then seven more years of me deciding she had to be the one to walk.

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