The Big Wife's Revenge: From Model to Queen novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Sidewalk

Corbin asks her home before the cameras and she gives back the ring.

Corbin crossed the sidewalk in six long steps.

The line of waiting models parted for him without a word.

His tie was loose, and he had not shaved.

"Roxie."

"You can't come in here."

"I'm not coming in. I'm asking you to come out."

The photographer had lifted his camera. Two more had appeared from nowhere.

Corbin lowered his voice, but not enough. "Come home. You've made your point."

"I made it yesterday, in front of everyone you invited."

"I was wrong not to stop my mother. I'm saying so now."

It was the first apology of my whole life with him.

A week ago it would have undone me.

I stood in the doorway of a stranger's studio with my arms folded and found I felt nothing at all.

"You said it on a sidewalk with cameras," I said. "That's not an apology. That's a press release."

His face changed. "That isn't fair."

"You didn't stop her for seven years, Corbin. You laughed when she called my hips a liability."

"I never laughed."

"You smiled. You smiled into your wine."

Someone in the line made a small sound.

A girl in a green coat whispered, "Oh my God, it's really him."

A second girl whispered back, "Shh. Let her finish."

Tobias had come up behind me, silent, with his hands in his pockets.

Corbin looked at him. "Who are you?"

"The man who's paying her on Wednesday."

"She's my wife."

"She was your wife until she took off the ring in front of three hundred people," Tobias said. "I thought that part was settled."

Corbin turned back to me.

Under the anger, there was something raw I had never seen.

"Roxie, I have never been without you. Not one day since you were twenty-two."

"That sounds like your problem," I said.

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the brass key to Rye Hall.

I had carried it on a string around my neck for seven years.

He had told me a wife should always be able to let herself in.

"I never lived there," I said. "I waited there. It isn't the same thing."

He stared at the key.

"It was supposed to be our house," he said slowly.

"It was your mother's house with my name on a drawer."

I set the key in his palm and closed his fingers over it.

The flashes went off in a rattle.

"Goodbye, Corbin."

I went back inside.

Behind me, I heard a photographer shout, "Mr. Hallworth, is it true she left you at the altar?"

And I heard Corbin say, in a voice that carried, "She did not leave me at the altar. I left her standing there."

I did not turn around.

I had waited seven years to hear him say that, and now it was worth exactly nothing.

Inside, Tobias handed me a paper cup of coffee with a hand that was not quite steady.

"That was either the bravest thing I've ever watched or the dumbest," he said.

"Which one?"

"Ask me Wednesday."

The rest of the day was paperwork, a contract, and a rate that made me sit down.

Hettie came to pick me up at six with a grin she couldn't hide.

We took the train back to Queens, and I leaned my head on the window.

For the first time in a week, I wasn't afraid.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

It was Rye Hall's housekeeper, who had worked there longer than I had known the family.

Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Miss Roxie, I'm sorry to call. I thought you should know."

"Know what?"

"Mrs. Hallworth had your things taken out this afternoon. All of it. I tried to stop them."

"What things?"

"The clothes, your books, your mother's quilt. They're on the curb, in garbage bags."

I sat straight up.

The train rattled into the tunnel.

"And Miss Roxie, it's going to rain tonight."

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