Off Limit: Claimed by My Ex-Fiancé's Stepdad novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: Collateral

Ward didn't look at me.

He looked at the phone lying on the table between the coffee cups.

"No," he said.

"Ward, think about it overnight."

"I don't need overnight. The stage manager stays. Have your lawyer call mine."

He hung up.

The general manager put her face in her hands. The director said, "Ward, that's four million dollars."

"I know what it is."

"We don't have it."

"We'll have it by Thursday," Ward said, and got up and walked out of the house.

I sat there with my afternoon notes in my lap.

"Did he just pick you over the show?" the director asked me.

"No," I said. "He picked the show with me in it. Places in ten."

Wednesday afternoon we were teching the storm.

The ferry deck sits on hydraulics. In the storm it pitches twelve degrees port and starboard while the ensemble clings to the rail and rain machines pour from the flies.

Then the steel bridge flies in over the deck and locks, and Lenore stands under it to sing.

I was in the middle of calling it when the doors at the back of the house slammed open.

"Hold, please," I said.

Jude came down the center aisle in his costume. He had a phone in his hand.

"You mortgaged the house?" he shouted at the production table. "You mortgaged my mother's house?"

Ward was sitting in the third row with a cup of coffee. He didn't get up.

"It's my house, Jude."

"She picked every room in it. She died in it."

"I know where she died."

"Four million dollars," Jude said to everybody. The ensemble was still hanging off the rail of the deck. "He put my mother's house up for his stage manager."

Every face turned toward my desk again.

I hadn't known. I hadn't known any of it.

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