His Test Cost Him a Wife, Not a Negotiation novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Porch

I ran down the stairs and out into the snow without my coat.

Pearl had started a live video.

She held her phone low against her EMT jacket, and I watched it on my screen with my breath smoking in front of me.

The porch was the one I had grown up on, with the cracked step and the bus parts stacked by the rail.

Winslow stood on it in a camel coat that cost more than the porch.

Rosalind stood beside him.

A man with a camera stood at the foot of the steps, filming both.

Eight hundred people were already watching.

My father opened the screen door in his work shirt, with a rag still in his hand.

"Mr. Pauley," Winslow said. "I'm sorry to come like this. We just want to talk to Dorinda."

"She's not here," my father said.

"We know," Rosalind said gently. She was good at gentle. "We came to make things right with you."

She took an envelope from her bag.

"This is for the trouble. Ten thousand dollars. No strings."

My father looked at it, and he did not take it.

"Dorinda's a lovely girl," Rosalind went on, to the camera and to him. "A little proud. We understand that, where we come from. I'm from Wheeling myself."

"I know you are," my father said.

"Then you know how it is. A girl wants a bigger life, and sometimes she asks for too much."

My father wiped his hands on the rag, one finger at a time.

"My daughter has never asked anybody for anything in her life," he said. "She paid for her own college. She paid for her own wedding. She paid half of yours, too, Mr. Whitstable, and I'd like to know how that goes in your family's books."

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