The Abandoned Wife novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Sapphire

Three years later Dara's mentor slides the file on her husband's failing company across a desk, and a flyer shows his first love wearing Dara's grandmother's ring; Dara decides to walk into the boardroom herself.

By nine on Monday morning I had already taken eleven million dollars off a man who thought he was winning.

He was a hotel owner in Milwaukee, and I did it in nineteen minutes on speakerphone, standing at my window with a cold cup of coffee.

"Thank you, Ms. Salter," he said at the end, sounding dazed. "I'm not sure what just happened."

"A lot of people say that," I said, and hung up.

Behind me, the cane struck the floor twice.

"You're toying with them again," Bernadine Gilchrist said.

She stood in my doorway in a cobalt suit with her iron-grey braid over one shoulder.

The cane had a brass bulldog on the handle that she pointed at people she liked.

It was pointed at me now.

"He had it coming," I said. "He called me sweetheart in the first minute."

"They all do, and then they sign."

She crossed the carpet, lowered herself into my guest chair and put a thin blue folder on the glass desk.

"Sit," she said.

My leg was aching from the rain.

I sat anyway, and my left knee gave its small familiar click, and she pretended not to hear it.

Three years and three months ago, she had driven two hundred miles in a rented van to get me out of an Indiana clinic.

She had never once told a soul where I'd been.

Down the hall my name was on a glass door in small silver letters, and the name was Salter.

"The bank sold us a note last Friday," she said. "Fifty million dollars of debt, mostly secured on trucks and a rail yard."

"Whose?"

"Open it."

I opened it, and the first page was a company letterhead I had once folded into thirds for three years of Christmas cards.

Kellerman Freight.

My hands stayed very still on the paper.

I had learned that trick from her, a long time ago.

"They missed two payments," Bernadine said. "The father's stroke started it, but the son is the one losing money. Six trucking contracts in three years went to rivals, and the numbers don't explain it."

"They explain it," I said.

"Do they?"

"Tom never wrote those contracts." I turned a page. "I did. At our kitchen table, until midnight, for free."

"I know."

"Without me, he gives away the best lanes because he hates asking for the last two percent."

"I know that too." She leaned on the cane. "I have a junior partner who can take this. He's careful and he's boring, and you would never have to see the man."

"No."

"Dara."

"I want to see the man."

She nodded slowly.

"Then look at the back," she said.

I turned to the last page.

It was a glossy flyer printed on heavy cream paper.

THE DARA KELLERMAN MEMORIAL FUND PRESENTS AN EVENING OF REMEMBRANCE.

Under that, in smaller letters: Join us Saturday to dedicate the Dara Wing at Lakeshore Children's Hospital.

The photo showed a ribbon, a pair of oversized scissors and two people in front of a glass lobby.

Tom stood in the middle with his white smile turned down to the right size for grief.

The woman beside him held the scissors in her right hand.

On her ring finger, small and sharp in the lens flash, sat an oval sapphire the blue of a gas flame, set in old yellow gold.

My grandmother had worn that ring through sixty years of marriage to a bus mechanic.

My mother had worn it for a day before she died, because she didn't want it lost in the hospital.

Tom had asked to borrow it that February to get the band enlarged.

He never brought it back.

"I thought it was in the car," I said. My voice came out calmer than I felt. "I thought it burned."

"That's Lena Renner," Bernadine said. "Chief of staff and the fund's chair. Engaged to him since Christmas."

"She's wearing my ring."

"Yes."

"They put my name on a hospital wing."

"They did."

"Does Lakeshore Children's know who paid for it?"

"I haven't asked yet." She watched me. "I wanted to know who you'd be when you read this."

I looked down at the flyer for a long time.

Somewhere in the building a printer started up, a mundane little whir.

"You never asked me what I wanted to do about him," I said. "In three years."

"You'd have told me when you were ready."

"I was ready the day I paid off that hospital."

"Then why didn't you act?"

"Because I wanted him to be in a corner when I walked in." I closed the folder over the flyer, and the sapphire disappeared. "I want him with his back against the one wall he can't charm."

"This is that wall," Bernadine said. "Fifty million, and a board that will sell to anyone who pays on the first of the month."

"Who's chief negotiator on the deal?"

"You can be."

"Tomorrow, nine o'clock?"

"He'll have a boardroom, a CFO, a chair and a fiancee in the room." The cane tapped once. "And he'll have no idea."

"He never did."

She stood up and smoothed her jacket, and for a moment her face looked older than sixty-one.

"Does he know you're alive?" she asked.

I picked up the folder and tucked it under my arm.

"He will by ten past nine," I said.

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