My Double Proxy Marriage to a Billionaire novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Lake of the Isles

At Greta's table Tilly tears up a quarter-million-dollar check and sets her terms; at 2 a.m. she hears Anders tell the wrong woman goodnight.

I did not answer Blair.

I put the phone face down against my thigh and rode the rest of the way to the lobby watching the numbers fall.

The car Greta sent was a long grey Volvo with a driver who called me ma'am and did not ask about my boots.

The Engdahl house sat on Lake of the Isles behind a low hedge.

It was white stucco with a green tile roof and a boathouse at the bottom of the lawn.

I could hear the motor before I saw it.

Somebody in the boathouse was pulling a starter cord over and over, and the engine kept catching and dying with a wet cough.

"Flooded," I said, getting out of the car. "And the plug's fouled."

"I beg your pardon?" said Greta, from the porch.

"Your outboard. He's choking it."

"That's the gardener. He's been at it since August."

"Hand me a screwdriver and a rag."

She looked at me for a second with her head tilted.

Then she laughed, a surprised bright bark of a laugh, and sent the housekeeper for a toolbox.

Four minutes later the old launch's motor settled into a low steady purr.

The gardener took off his cap and stared at me.

"Her mother's girl," Greta said, with enormous satisfaction, and slipped her arm through mine.

Dinner was in a long yellow room with a view of the water.

There was roast chicken, and potatoes with dill.

Anders came in last, in shirtsleeves, with his tie off.

He took the chair across from me.

"My stepsister's name is Blair Tiffany," I said, before anyone had picked up a fork.

Greta set down her glass.

"She's twenty-nine. She lives in my father's house. Two hours ago she told me this."

I put my phone on the table and turned it around.

Anders read the text without touching it.

Be a good sport, Til. One week. He's mine on Saturday.

His face did not change at all.

"It proves you have a stepsister who wants to marry me," he said.

"It proves she knows what Saturday is."

"I told you what Saturday is in front of my lawyer," he said. "A minute before you walked into an elevator."

He spread his hands.

"You could have typed that on the way down."

"From a phone I'm holding in my other hand?"

"From a second phone. I don't know your methods."

"Anders," Greta said.

"I'm saying what a careful man would say."

"You are saying what a frightened man would say."

He didn't answer that.

He reached into his jacket and took out an envelope.

It was cream-colored and thick, with the Engdahl Freight crest in the corner.

He laid it on the tablecloth next to the beets and slid it across.

I opened it.

It was a cashier's check, made out to me, for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

"For your trouble," he said. "And for your signature on an annulment tomorrow morning. It's far more than your father is owed."

"Anders," Greta said again, sharper.

I looked at the number.

I looked at the old woman at the head of the table and the cold bright man across from me.

I thought about the sixty-one thousand dollars my father swore the yard owed.

Then I tore the check in half.

I tore it again.

I laid the four pieces on his plate, in a neat line, next to his potatoes.

Greta clapped once, softly, with the tips of her fingers.

"Do that one more time," she said. "I missed the best part."

"I don't want your money," I said. "I want my name back."

"Somebody has been using it for four months and I mean to find out who."

"And if you can't?"

"Then I'll go."

"Not good enough," he said. "I want terms."

"I stay until the Regatta Ball. Saturday week. I get my own room and my own door, and nobody touches me but me."

"Agreed."

"At the Ball you ask one question. Whatever you like, in front of everyone. Whoever's your wife can answer it."

"And if you can't answer it?"

"I sign your annulment and walk out with nothing. Not a dime, not a dress."

"And if you can?"

I held his gaze.

"Then you stand up in that room and say you were wrong. Out loud. With a microphone."

Something went across his face then that I couldn't read.

It was almost respect.

It was gone before I could name it.

"Done," Anders said.

Greta lifted her water glass.

"To the Ball," she said. "I haven't enjoyed a week this much since 1974."

A gray-haired housekeeper showed me to a room at the end of the upstairs hall.

It was bigger than the whole apartment over the yard office.

My duffel bag sat on the bed, the one I had left in my father's front hall that morning.

Someone had dropped it at the gate at noon, the housekeeper said, and driven off without a word.

I unzipped it.

On top was the silver wrench pendant I had never once taken off and had never once left behind.

I sat on the edge of the bed and held it for a long time.

At two in the morning I got up for a glass of water and found the door across the hall standing open a hand's width.

A strip of light lay across the carpet.

Anders was at the desk in the study with his back to me, in a pale shirt, his phone propped against a lamp.

His thumbs moved.

The phone buzzed once, and his shoulders came down.

"Goodnight, wife," he said, very quietly, as he typed it.

I stood in the dark with my hand on the wall.

The man was being gentle, and it wasn't to me.

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