The Video Called Me His Mistress, But I Was His Wife novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Offer

Hazel walks back into the tower. Lydia is kind. Richard offers two million to vanish and tells her her father took his.

"My father was a machinist," I told Gavin in the doorway. "Your father's company bought his shop."

It was true. It was the smallest true thing I could hand him.

"That's all?"

"That's all I'm saying at three in the morning."

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he nodded, and he left.

At nine o'clock I walked back into the tower.

Ruby had lent me a navy blouse that was one size too large. I wore my hair down over the bruise.

The lobby was quieter than the day before.

The two women in cream coats were gone. In their place stood forty people from three floors, holding coffee and not drinking it.

Nobody spoke as I crossed the marble.

A man from accounting looked at the floor.

A woman I had trained last spring turned her back on me.

I stepped into the elevator and pressed twenty-eight.

Two women got in behind me, then thought better of it and got out again.

On twenty-eight the glass wall of the communications office was open.

Lydia came out with a paper cup in each hand.

"Hazel. You came back. Oh, sweetheart, look at your face."

She set a cup in my hand.

It was tea with honey, the way I took it.

"I'm so sorry about yesterday," she said. "I should have walked you out myself. I thought you'd be safe at my desk."

"I'm fine."

"You are not fine. You're the bravest woman in this building." She touched the lanyard at her neck. "The engagement announcement wasn't my idea. Richard insisted. Gavin told me it was for show."

"He told me that too."

"Then he told us both the truth." She smiled, and her eyes were wet. "I hope you two can work it out. I really do."

I drank the tea.

I did not ask why she had needed to charge my phone for an hour.

A man's voice spoke behind her.

"Miss Brennan."

Richard Prescott stood at the end of the corridor with his silver cane planted in front of him.

He never leaned on it. I had watched him for six years and he had never once leaned on it.

"My office," he said. "Now, please."

His office was on the top floor, with windows on three sides and the lake flat and gray beyond them.

Two men from the board sat in leather chairs, pretending to read.

Richard did not ask me to sit.

"I'll be brief," he said. "My son has had a lapse in judgment. You have been embarrassed. Neither of those facts needs to be a public matter."

He slid a folder across the desk.

Inside was a cashier's check made out to me.

It had a two, then six zeros.

"Two million dollars," he said. "A signed statement that you and my son were never more than employer and employee. A flight to anywhere you like. A reference that will get you any job you want."

I looked at the check.

I had been inside this man's building for six years, and this was the first time he had said my name.

"And if I say no?"

"Then I can't help what the newspapers say about a woman who stalks her married employer." He smiled thinly. "Or what happens to the care your mother receives."

My teacup was still in my hand.

I set it down on his desk very carefully, so my hand wouldn't shake.

"I'm not going anywhere, Mr. Prescott."

"Everyone takes it in the end, Miss Brennan."

"Not everyone."

"Your father did," Richard said.

The two board members stopped pretending to read.

I had stood in a cold kitchen at nineteen and listened to my mother say my father had died owing everyone he knew.

I did not know what Richard meant.

Richard watched my face and understood that I didn't.

For one second, something that was almost pleasure crossed his.

"Ask your mother," he said. "If she remembers."

I picked up the check.

I tore it down the middle, and I tore the halves again, and I set them on his desk like confetti.

"I'll see you at the board meeting," I said.

"You are not invited to the board meeting."

"I take the minutes."

I walked out.

In the corridor my knees went soft and I put my hand on the wall.

Behind me, through the closing door, I heard Richard tell the room very calmly:

"Call Lydia. Tell her we move on Friday."

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