My Father Went to Prison for Their Money, So I Married Their Heir novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Terms

In his boathouse Beau explains his grandfather's will and Sabra writes her own terms before she signs.

Beau drove us out to the Isle of Hope, past the live oaks, and stopped at the end of a shell road.

There was a boathouse there with its lights on.

Behind it a sloop sat under a canvas cover on a wooden lift, and Beau walked past it without looking.

"Not the house," he said. "Nobody is listening in here."

I walked in with his jacket on my shoulders and my shoes in my hand.

It was one big room with a woodstove, a table covered in old charts and a leather couch someone had slept on a lot.

He lit the stove and put a kettle on it.

I stood in the middle of the floor and did not sit.

"Tell me why a man like you needs a woman like me," I said. "Say it plain."

"My grandfather left me the controlling shares of Ravenel Terminals," Beau said. "Fifty-one percent."

"He wrote one condition into it. I have to be married before my thirty-fifth birthday, and still be married, with my wife in the room, on the three hundred and sixty-fifth day."

"If I'm not, the shares go to my father."

"Your birthday's in twenty-nine days," I said.

"You've done your reading."

"I've done eleven years of reading about your family."

He did not look away from that.

"My father knows the condition," he said. "He's been picking my wife for two years. The Charleston girl is the third one. If I'm married by Friday, he can't announce anything."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you go home, and I find another wife, and you have nothing from tonight except a very good speech."

The kettle began to hiss.

I thought about Opal's kitchen, and the folder of trial papers I had read at that table until the pages went soft.

I thought about my father in a visiting room, thinner every year.

I had stood at that microphone for ten minutes, and I had not moved one thing.

"Why me?" I said.

"You walked up to my father and said his name out loud," said Beau. "I've waited a long time for somebody to do that."

It was not an answer.

He knew it was not an answer, and I knew he knew.

But he did not look like a man who was lying to me.

He looked tired.

"I want terms," I said.

"Write them."

He pushed a legal pad across the table and I wrote them standing up.

Twelve months, and not one day longer.

Separate rooms in his father's house.

He never speaks about my father unless I speak about him first.

If he lies to me once, I walk, and the shares go wherever they go.

No touching when nobody is watching.

I turned the pad around and he read it, slowly, all five lines.

"Four of those I can do," he said. "I'd add one."

"What?" I said.

"On the three hundred and sixty-fifth day you're in the room. Whatever's happened by then."

"That's the whole point of me."

"No," Beau said. "That's the whole point of the shares."

I did not know what he meant by that, and I let it go.

I signed my name under his.

He had a scar across the left palm, white and old, and when he put the pen down I took hold of his hand without thinking.

"What happened to this?"

"Broken glass. A long time ago."

My thumb was lying along the scar.

I felt his pulse going hard against the inside of his wrist.

He did not pull his hand away, and neither did I.

The stove ticked beside us.

I told myself I was checking whether he was nervous.

He was.

I let go first.

"That was only to look," I said.

"Of course," said Beau.

His voice was lower than it had been a minute before.

We did it on Friday morning at the county courthouse, in a gray room with a plastic fern.

I wore my mother's blue dress and Beau wore a suit that fit.

The clerk read the words in a bored voice.

Beau slid a ring onto my finger, a plain gold one with a worn place on the inside.

"It was my grandmother's," he said quietly. "She asked me to use it."

I did not ask who had told her.

There were two witnesses in the room.

One was a clerk from the next office.

The other came in late, buttoning his blazer, with his signet ring catching the light.

Winston Ravenel signed the register without looking at me.

Then he looked at me, and his smile was perfectly kind.

"Welcome to the family, Mrs. Ravenel," he said. "Please say hello to Amos for me."

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