Swapped My Ex for His Billionaire Uncle novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Town Hall

Pamela carries the eviction notice into the Hargreave all-hands meeting, and Gregory overrules it in front of two hundred staff. Lorna summons her to Sunday dinner.

I did not go to work that morning.

I called in, took the notice off my door, and rode the Red Line downtown in navy scrubs with a coffee I didn't drink.

The doorman at the Hargreave Tower looked at me, looked at my face, and lifted the velvet rope.

"Tuesday all-hands is on the mezzanine, Ms. Quinlan," he said. "Go on up."

"You know my name."

"I was at the desk yesterday," he said. "Go on up."

The mezzanine was a wide glass atrium with two hundred people standing in rows.

They were facing a small stage, with a podium and a screen full of numbers.

Gregory stood at the podium in his charcoal suit, talking about container volume.

He sounded like a man who had said the same thing a hundred times and still meant it.

Colin stood at the end of the front row with his arms folded.

He saw me at the back of the room and went very still.

I held the notice up over my head.

Gregory was in the middle of a sentence about the third quarter.

He stopped.

The whole room turned to follow his eyes.

"Ms. Quinlan," he said, and the microphone carried it to every wall. "Did you have a question?"

"Just one," I said, and I walked down the center aisle with two hundred people watching.

It was the longest walk of my life, and my voice stayed steady the whole way.

"Is it Hargreave policy to evict a pediatric nurse for refusing to sign a lie?"

The room made a sound.

"Pamela," Colin said, from the front row, very softly. "This isn't the place."

"You taped it to my door in the middle of the night," I said. "You picked the place."

Gregory came down off the stage.

He took the notice from my hand and read it all the way through, slowly, while two hundred people held their breath.

He didn't look at me, and he didn't look at Colin.

"Who authorized this?"

Nobody said a word.

"I'll ask once," Gregory said. "Who authorized a non-renewal on a tenant in good standing?"

"Thirty days, on the fourth floor of a building we own on Dorchester Avenue?"

A woman in the third row raised her hand halfway.

"The signature is Colin's, sir," she said. "He asked for it last night."

"Last night."

"Yes, sir."

"After the mediation."

"I don't know about that, sir. I just process them."

Gregory turned, finally, to his nephew.

Colin lifted his chin.

"It's a routine non-renewal, Uncle. She's behind on the lease."

"I have paid on the first of every month for three months, by check," I said. "I brought the stubs."

I had them in my coat pocket, a folded wad of yellow paper.

I held them up.

Somebody at the back of the atrium started to clap, once, then stopped.

Gregory took the stubs from my hand, glanced at the top one, and gave them to the woman in the third row.

"This notice is rescinded," he said. "Effective now. Ms. Quinlan keeps her apartment as long as she wants it, at the rent she's paying."

"Uncle Gregory, you can't override a VP in front of the whole staff."

"I'm the CEO of the whole staff," Gregory said.

He held a pen out to Colin.

"There's a rescission form on the lectern. Sign it now, and I won't ask why you have a key to a tenant's apartment."

My head snapped around.

Colin went red from the collar up.

"How did you..."

"The building manager called me at six this morning," Gregory said. "He keeps a key log."

Colin signed the form on the podium in front of two hundred people.

His hand shook so hard the pen skipped.

When it was done, Gregory walked me out to the elevator bank at the back of the mezzanine and stopped where nobody could hear.

I was shaking, finally, now that it was over.

"I didn't ask for your help," I said.

"I know," he said. "That's why I did it."

"That doesn't make sense."

"It makes more sense than you think. Nobody who asks for my help in this building is ever telling the truth."

"I'm not going to have dinner with you."

"It's Tuesday. I said Thursday."

"I'm still not going to have dinner with you."

"Understood," said Gregory Hargreave, and the corner of his mouth moved a quarter of an inch.

The elevator opened.

Lorna Hargreave stepped out of it in a camel coat, with her pearl earrings and her handbag held in front of her.

She had clearly been listening to the end of the meeting from the speaker in the lobby.

She looked at Gregory, then at the scrubs I was wearing, then at me.

"Pamela, dear," she said, with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Sunday dinner. Six o'clock. We'll all be there."

"I'm not coming to dinner."

"Oh, but you are," Lorna said pleasantly. "Or I'll tell everyone exactly what you did."

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