He Never Looked Up at Breakfast, So I Served Him Papers novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Fourteen Years of Cards

The meeting was on Monday, in a glass conference room above the bank on Main Street.

Dot had found me a lawyer, a calm woman in a grey suit who had represented half the waitresses in the county.

She sat on my right with a folder.

On the other side of the long table sat Stuart, Bryce Haldane, and a tall man in a pinstripe suit who was Stuart's attorney.

Bryce had come in from New York on an early flight.

He wore a navy suit and held a phone in each hand.

He smiled at me with all his teeth.

"Elise. Lovely to see you. We all want this to be civil."

"So do I," I said.

Stuart sat with his hands flat on the table and did not meet my eyes.

His attorney opened a binder.

"Mrs. Harmon, my client is prepared to be generous," he said. "The house, which is in his name, stays with him. The royalties from his novels, which he alone wrote, stay with him. In recognition of your fourteen years, he will offer a one-time payment of sixty thousand dollars."

I looked at him.

"Sixty thousand."

"Plus the car."

"The royalties from Sunrise Arithmetic have paid for every meal I cooked in that house for six years," I said. "The film deal is worth four million."

"Which your husband created."

"Alone?"

"Alone, in his studio, by the labor of his own imagination."

Bryce nodded along.

My lawyer put a hand on the folder but did not open it yet.

"Go ahead," she said quietly.

I reached into my bag.

I set my old teaching planner on the table, a fat black book with a ribbon marker and a cracked spine.

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