My Fake-Dead Husband Came Crawling After I Became an Heiress novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Let Them Come

Zane and Bernard hear the video, and Hallie decides to let her family walk into Friday's signing. Maureen is already at the gate.

I stayed behind the pillar until their voices went down the escalator.

Then I walked out of the Galleria without the shortbread.

Zane Overton was leaning on the black car at the east doors with his arms folded.

He took one look at my face and opened the back door for me instead of making a joke.

"Who," he said.

"Get in and I'll show you."

He got in beside me, and I handed him the phone.

I watched him watch the video.

Zane was the one who had found me in Tulsa, and in three weeks I had never seen him lose his temper.

His jaw went tight at the part about three peaceful years.

At my mother's gift to the baby, he set the phone down on his knee very gently.

"The man in the grey coat is your husband," he said.

"Dalton Fenn. He died three years ago."

"He's wearing very good shoes for a dead man."

I laughed, and then I couldn't stop, and then it was not laughing.

Zane did not touch me.

He turned the heat up and waited until I was done.

"I'm calling the police," he said.

"For what?"

"Fraud. Two death certificates."

"And they say it was a mistake, a mix-up at a hospital with two bodies on a bad night." I wiped my face with my sleeve. "My mother cries. Dalton cries. Cora cries, and she's pregnant. By Monday I'm the one who hates a grieving family."

Zane looked out the window.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"I want them to keep their plan."

He turned and stared at me.

"They plan to walk in on Friday, in front of whoever is there, and say he's alive and I'm his wife," I said. "I want the whole room to hear that. Then I want the room to see this."

I took the phone back and held up the screen.

Zane said nothing for a long moment.

"Bernard sent me to bring you home," he said. "He didn't send me to help you burn down a family."

"They burned me down first."

"I know." He started the car. "That's why I'm saying it out loud before I help you."

The Appleton house sat on the lake shore, behind iron gates, with every window lit.

Bernard was waiting in the front room in a cardigan, with a blanket over his knees and a cough he kept hiding in his fist.

He was sixty-seven and looked eighty.

I had known him for three weeks, and every time he saw me he looked like a man seeing a ghost he had been hoping for.

"You didn't bring the shortbread," he said.

"I brought something worse."

I told him all of it, in order, and Zane played the video on the big television.

Bernard watched with his hand over his mouth.

When Maureen held the little silver lock against Cora's belly, he made a sound I had not heard from him before.

"I loved that woman once," he said. "I didn't know she was capable of this."

"You didn't know she was capable of lying to me for twenty-nine years either."

He shut his eyes.

"No," he said. "I didn't."

Then he opened them and looked at me, sharp and steady for the first time that day.

"Tell me what you want, Hallie."

"Friday. The signing. All of it in front of the press."

"The press will be there. I invited them myself." He coughed and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. "I wanted the world to see my daughter."

"Then let the world see this."

"I'll give you the room," he said. "The stage, the screen, the sound. Zane will set it up."

"And Maureen?"

"Let her sit in the front row," Bernard said. "I want her to be comfortable."

Zane took my phone to send the video to a place Bernard's lawyers kept safe.

His fingers closed over mine as he took it.

They were warm and rough from the car's steering wheel, and neither of us let go as fast as we should have.

"Eat something," he said quietly. "Then be angry."

He took the phone and went into the hall.

I stood at the window with my coat still on and my hand in the pocket, closed around Dalton's ring.

It had been in that coat for three years.

I kept thinking I would throw it into the lake when I got tired enough.

At nine o'clock, the gate camera chimed.

Zane came back into the room with his face blank.

"Someone's at the gate," he said.

I looked at the small screen on the wall.

It was raining hard, and a woman stood under the streetlight with no umbrella, holding a shoebox against her chest.

She looked up straight into the lens.

"Hallie?" my mother said through the speaker, in her kindest voice. "Baby, it's Mom."

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