After Divorce, My Ex-Wife Became a Billionaire novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Gate

At dawn Darrell and Vivian demand to meet Larkspur at the Sorrell gate, and Rhiannon reads the terms from the balcony. Jocelyn answers with a photo of her mother's ring on her hand.

The first thing I heard in my father's house was a man shouting my name through an iron gate.

It was ten past six on Saturday morning.

I had slept four hours in the bed I grew up in, under a ceiling I painted stars on at nine.

For a second I thought the shouting was a dream.

Then Darrell shouted it again, and I knew the voice by its crack.

I put on my father's old gray cardigan and went down the hall.

Nadine was asleep on the sofa in the glass room with her boots on and a laptop open on her stomach.

Winslow stood at the window with a cup of coffee, looking down the drive.

He did not turn around.

"Both of them," he said. "And a car with a lawyer in it, parked across the street. Your husband brought backup."

"Ex-husband."

"Not until the court stamps it."

"Then he's the husband who gets to hear it from me."

I took the coffee out of his hand and drank half.

He watched me do it, and one corner of his mouth moved.

"It's hot," he said.

"I know."

The balcony over the front door gave a clean view of the gate, forty yards of gravel and a century of limestone between us.

On the other side, in a rumpled tux with the bow tie hanging, stood the man I had been married to for six years.

His hair was not gelled.

I had never once seen him in public with his hair not gelled.

Vivian stood beside him in a mink coat and the pearls, gripping the bars.

"Rhiannon!" Darrell saw me and his whole body jerked. "Open this gate!"

"Good morning," I said.

My voice carried well. My father built the porch for that.

"This is a joke," Vivian said. "A joke, and not even a good one. Who let her in there?"

"I live here," I said.

"You live in a tower condo my son pays for."

"I lived in a tower condo your son was lent. This house has been in my family for ninety years."

Darrell's mouth opened.

He looked past me at the carved stone above the door.

SORRELL, it said, in letters a foot high.

I watched him read it.

He had known my maiden name for six years.

He had never once connected it to the name on the Sorrell Foundation wing at the children's hospital.

"Sorrell," he said slowly. "You said your father left you a little."

"He left me a little. It's relative."

Behind him on the sidewalk the lawyer got out of his car and thought better of coming closer.

Darrell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Fine. You've made your point. You humiliated me on the roof, in front of the investors. You've had your night."

"It wasn't a night. It was a notice."

"Okay. So here's what's going to happen."

He put his palms together, the way he did when a vendor was late.

"We say it was a misunderstanding. You come home. I tear up the petition. I'll even forgive the scene."

I laughed.

I couldn't help it.

"You'll forgive me."

"I'm trying to be the bigger person."

"You brought your mistress to the gala to hand me papers. Where is she?"

He glanced at his own car.

"Don't," Darrell said.

It was too late.

The rear door of the Gaines sedan swung open.

Jocelyn stepped out in a camel coat and sunglasses, and she did not look like a woman who had been up all night.

She looked like a woman who thought she was the second act.

"Hi, Rhiannon!" she called. "No hard feelings!"

Nadine appeared at my elbow in her socks.

"I'm going to throw a pot at her," she whispered.

"Not yet."

I turned back to the gate and took out the sheet Winslow had printed at five.

"Here is what happens," I said. "The Larkspur credit line is called. You have thirty days to repay four hundred million dollars."

Darrell laughed, high and wrong.

"I don't have four hundred million."

"I know."

"Nobody has four hundred million."

"My father did," I said. "He left it to me, along with the rest."

Vivian's hand went to her pearls.

"The Larkspur shares come off the table too. Thirty-eight percent. I'll vote them at the next meeting, and I will vote against you."

"Honey." Darrell's voice dropped to the one he used on investors. "Rhi. Honey. We can fix this. You don't want to do this to us."

"Us."

"To the company. To the five hundred people who work for us."

"You laid off sixty of them by email on Tuesday," I said.

He went silent.

The doorman had told me last night, on his way out.

I had never been surer of anything.

At the gate, Jocelyn made a small impatient sound and lifted her hand to push her sunglasses back.

The morning sun came across the lake and lit something on her ring finger.

A small oval ruby in plain gold.

I stopped breathing.

It was my mother's.

She had worn it on the day she died.

I had been nineteen.

I had kept it in a velvet box in my jewelry drawer for fourteen years.

Last spring the box had been empty, and Darrell had said I must have misplaced it.

"Oh," Jocelyn said, following my eyes.

She turned her hand to the light and smiled right at me.

"Isn't it pretty?"

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