System Erased Her From My Memory novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Maia's Offer

Maia's POV

I told Wes I would throw the card away.

I put it in the trash can at the clinic while he watched.

Then I fished it out again at lunch and drove to the lake.

The Vanstone Lakeside flagship hotel has a lobby the size of a church.

A woman in a gray suit took me up to the fortieth floor without asking my name.

She had been told it.

Delaney's father sat behind a long desk with the whole city at his back.

He was about sixty, silver-haired, and very still.

He didn't stand up.

"Mrs. Schrader," he said. "Thank you for coming without your husband."

"I told him I'd throw your card away."

"And yet."

"I want to hear what you think you know about him."

He almost smiled.

"Please. Sit."

I stayed on my feet.

He opened a drawer and laid a check on the blotter and turned it so I could read it.

It had a one and six zeros.

"This is a gift," he said. "No paperwork. You take your savings and your clinic, and you take a very long vacation."

"Without Wes."

"Without Wes."

My hands were cold.

I kept them in my jacket pockets so he couldn't see them.

"Your daughter threw champagne at me five days ago," I said. "You want me to leave my husband so she can have him?"

"I want my daughter to stop destroying herself."

"That's not my job."

"No," he said. "It's his."

I looked at the check again.

I thought about what a million dollars would do for the clinic.

New tables.

A second therapist.

I thought about a man with a thumb pressed behind his left eye, standing in my doorway on a Tuesday in May, saying, I'm sorry, I think I'm in the wrong place.

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