The Taste of My Husband's Brother (A Wife's Revenge) novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: The Pen

"Mémère," I said. "Wait."

"I've waited, chère." She didn't look up from the folder. "It's a quarter past noon. I've waited since September."

The silver pen touched the paper.

Then somebody screamed my name from the bottom of the hill.

Not my name.

Hers.

"BABETTE ARCENEAUX! DON'T YOU DARE!"

Every head on the lawn turned.

Lise was running up the big house hill in her apron and her red bandana, with a sheet of paper over her head.

She'd run the whole way from the café.

You could tell, because she couldn't breathe and she kept yelling anyway.

"Don't sign it! Don't you sign that! I've got it! I've got it!"

She came through the white tents and knocked over a chair.

She didn't stop for it.

She slapped the paper down on the small table on top of the leather folder, right under Mémère's pen.

Then she bent over with her hands on her knees and wheezed.

"Printer jammed," she said. "Twice. I kicked it."

My phone buzzed in my lap.

Etienne.

"She tasted it. She cried a little. She signed. Tell Lise to run."

I laughed out loud in the middle of the lawn.

Mémère put on her reading glasses.

She read the page with one crooked finger, the way she reads the Sunday paper.

A national order.

Arceneaux Green.

Twenty-three hundred stores, starting in the spring.

The grocer's signature at the bottom, and a line in blue ink beside it.

"Tasted the clean run on my sister's kitchen table at 9:04. Worth the wait."

Mémère read it twice.

The buyer leaned over to look.

"Mrs. Arceneaux," he said. "A grocery order for a garnish doesn't pay an eleven-million-dollar note."

"It doesn't have to pay it," Mémère said. "The bank wants something new, with a real buyer, signed on paper. This is new. That's a real buyer. That's paper."

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