The Phoenix's Rebirth for Revenge novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: The Ring

Ambrose opened the car door for me and leaned on the roof while I got in.

He was looking past me at the lobby.

The lawyer in the charcoal suit was walking back to his own car with his phone at his ear.

"You told him no," Ambrose said.

"How can you tell?"

"He's walking like a man who has to call his client."

"I'm going to the hearing," I said.

"Then so am I." He shut my door, came around and got in. "I'll need a suit that doesn't smell like a boat shed."

"You own eleven good shirts."

"Ten. You took the button off one."

He started the engine.

Then he sat with his hands on the wheel and didn't pull out.

"When is it?" he asked.

"Whenever her lawyer runs out of ways to stall."

Her lawyer ran out in May.

Two nights before the hearing, Gran called a poker game at the kitchen island on Marlborough Street.

She had never gone home.

The cellar door at Beacon Hill had been rehung with new iron in August, and my father still lived upstairs, and Gran said she wasn't sleeping over either of them.

She'd moved her wingback into Ambrose's ground-floor suite in September and called his kitchen hers by Christmas.

I'd come off a twelve-hour shift on the cardiac floor at seven that evening.

The hospital had called me the week after the gala video went around.

The nurse manager had apologized twice on the phone and once in person.

Gran dealt.

She had the coffee can of pennies at her elbow and her men's watch pushed up her wrist.

"Ante," she said.

I put in a penny.

Ambrose put in a ring.

It landed in the can with a small bright click, on top of the pennies.

A single old diamond in a plain gold band.

Gran looked at it.

Then she looked at him.

"That's not a penny," she said.

"No."

"Everything in my pot is mine, young man."

"Not that."

Gran picked it up between finger and thumb and held it to the light over the island.

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