Too Late, Don Russo: His Pregnant Wife Signed First novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Harbor Point

Bea meets Betsy at the bus stop, guesses the pregnancy, and the morning news shows Don cancelling his announcement, before a courier brings five million dollars for her silence.

The bus pulled into Harbor Point at eleven the next morning.

Grandma Bea stood at the stop in her bathrobe, a fisherman's coat and rubber boots.

She was seventy-four and she had been standing there since six.

She did not say a word.

She opened her arms, and I walked into them in my four-thousand-dollar gown.

"Look at you," she said into my hair. "Barefoot in January. Come on."

I had taken my heels off on the bus, and I couldn't feel my toes.

Her cottage sat on the harbor, gray shingles and a crooked porch, exactly as I'd left it three years ago.

Three years.

I had not been back once.

Don had always had a meeting.

She put me in her kitchen chair, wrapped a quilt around me and set a mug of ginger tea in my hands.

"Now," she said. "Tell it plain."

So I did.

The anniversary, the toast, the papers on the desk.

Marco's laugh through the study door.

The balcony, the glance, the dance.

"He signed first," I said. "I signed under him. I didn't even cry in front of anybody."

Bea's jaw worked.

"That man," she said slowly, "never answered one of my Christmas cards."

"He's busy."

"Three cards. Three years. Not a line back."

I hadn't known that.

I looked at the mug.

She watched me hold it with both hands against my stomach.

She watched for a long time.

"Betsy Penberthy," she said. "How far along?"

My whole face gave it away before I could speak.

"Six weeks," I whispered. "I found out Tuesday."

"Does he know?"

"No."

"Good," said Bea. "Then he doesn't get to."

She got up, turned on the little television over the stove and put the toast on like we were any two people having breakfast.

"They'll be replaying him," she said. "Watch."

The business channel had the board breakfast on a loop.

Don stood at the head of a long table in a charcoal suit.

Behind him was a wall of cameras.

Marco sat to his right, one hand tapping a folder, wearing his easy grin.

Don held a single page of notes.

He looked down at it.

He looked at it for a long time.

The anchor's voice said, "Sources say Russo Group's CEO was expected to make a personal announcement this morning."

Marco leaned over and said something in Don's ear.

Don didn't look at him.

"There will be no announcement," Don said.

The room went still.

"This meeting is over."

He walked out through the cameras.

Marco's grin slid off his face, and for half a second the TV caught what was under it.

"Hm," said Bea.

My phone was on the table, charging from her outlet.

I had turned it on at the bus stop in the dark.

It showed forty-one missed calls.

Every one was from Don.

I watched it light up again with his name.

Forty-two.

"Don't," Bea said.

"I wasn't going to."

"You were holding it like you were going to."

I switched it off and put it in the drawer with her string and her rubber bands.

My hands weren't steady.

Why wouldn't he make the announcement?

He had signed.

He had danced.

He'd had a plan, and the plan was in his handwriting.

"Maybe it ruined his day to find out I took the cameras," I said.

"Maybe," said Bea. "Or maybe the man only cares when somebody leaves."

I slept fourteen hours in my old bed under the quilt with the faded lighthouses.

The next morning a black sedan with Connecticut plates came slowly down the lane.

A courier in a gray coat got out and walked up to the porch.

"Ms. Penberthy?"

I had not told anyone where I was.

Not Don.

Not Marco.

Not Valeria.

He held out a thick cream envelope.

"Hand delivery. I'm told to wait for a signature."

Inside was a cashier's check made out to Elizabeth Penberthy.

Five million dollars.

Clipped to it was a single-page agreement from the Russo Group's lawyers, with little yellow flag tabs along the edge.

It was an agreement to stay silent.

I read the line three times.

It said nothing about the divorce and nothing about the press.

It said, in plain legal words, that I would never speak to anyone about what happened at the house on the night of the party.

Bea read it over my shoulder with her glasses on the end of her nose.

"Five million to keep a girl quiet who has never once raised her voice," she said.

"I don't understand it either."

"Then he's the one who's scared, and you're the one holding the pen."

She took the check from my hand and set it face down on the table, under the salt shaker.

Nobody pays five million dollars to keep a marriage quiet.

Somebody was afraid of what I had seen.

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