He Waited for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 3 of 48
Chapter 3: Four Words
Nicholas's father died of the same four words as Christina's last life, she sets a one-year engagement, the tabloids call her a buyer of husbands, and Bryant's father calls a board meeting on her fitness.
The SUV stopped at a red light on Madison.
A cab honked somewhere behind us.
"How?" I said.
Nicholas's hands were folded on his knee. The knuckles of the right one were crossed with an old white scar.
"Fifteen years ago my father refused to sell him our graphite rights. Russell flew up to Big Timber twice. My father turned him down twice."
"And then?"
"Three weeks later my father drove down the road from our mine in his pickup. It's eleven miles of switchbacks. He'd driven it every day for twenty years."
The light turned green.
"He went off the fourth curve. The truck rolled four hundred feet."
I didn't say anything.
"I was fourteen. I went to see the truck at the tow yard. The brake line was split clean. Not frayed. Clean."
"Did you tell anyone?"
"Everyone. The sheriff. The insurance man. My grandmother."
"What did the report say?"
He almost smiled.
Brake failure. Driver error.
My hands went cold in my lap.
The exact same words.
A curve over the water. My mother's voice. The guardrail coming apart.
"Christina?"
"I'm fine."
"You're white."
"It's been a long birthday."
He looked at me a moment longer, then let it go.
"Only one adult believed me," he said. "He wrote it down, and he told me he couldn't prove it either. He told me to get educated and get patient."
"Who?"
"Your father."
I turned in my seat.
"My father never said a word about you."
"I asked him not to."
The SUV pulled up outside our house on East 78th Street.
The porch light was on.
My mother's shadow moved behind the living room curtains.
Nicholas didn't reach for the door.
"You should know what this is before you sign anything," he said. "I'm not here to fall in love with an heiress. I'm here because Russell wants your patents, and I want Russell."
"I know what it is."
"Do you?"
"You want a seat at our table. I want somebody at my side who doesn't laugh when Bryant does."
He considered that.
"That's a fair trade."
"One year," I said. "We're engaged for a year. If either of us wants out after that, we shake hands and we're done. No scene. No press."
"One year."
"And you don't lie to me."
"I don't lie to anyone. It's my worst quality."
He held out his scarred hand.
I shook it.
His grip was warm and dry and didn't try to prove anything.
I was halfway up the steps when he rolled the window down.
"Miss Ferraro."
I turned.
"Ice," he said, and pointed at his own cheekbone.
The window rolled back up.
My mother opened the door before I reached it.
She took one look at my face and her mouth went flat.
"Who did that?"
"Bryant."
She didn't say a word.
She went to the kitchen and came back with a bag of frozen peas and her phone already at her ear.
I slept with the peas on my face and woke up at seven to my phone buzzing itself off the nightstand.
Forty-one messages.
The first one was a link from a girl I hadn't spoken to since tenth grade.
FERRARO HEIRESS BUYS A MONTANA HUSBAND TO SPITE THE MAN WHO DUMPED HER.
The photo was from the ballroom doors.
My cheek was bleeding. I was holding a stranger's arm. My face looked like I'd won something.
Under it, a second photo.
Bryant with his arm around Shelby, her head bowed, her hand over her heart.
The caption said she had been "shaken to tears by the confrontation."
I scrolled through the comments.
Desperate.
She paid for a husband with daddy's money.
Poor Shelby. That girl has been bullying her for years.
I set the phone face down.
My mother knocked once and came in with coffee.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
"Your father wants you downstairs," she said.
"Is it the articles?"
"No. It's your uncle."
Bryant's father wasn't my uncle. Everyone in the family called him that anyway.
"He's called an emergency family meeting of the board," my mother said. "Monday at nine."
"About what?"
She handed me the coffee.
"About whether you're fit to keep the seat you got yesterday."
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