They Chose the Daughter I Found, So I Called In Their Loans novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Nineteen So Far

Jackie's POV

I had been waiting for this since a gas lamp on Friday night, and I still had flour on my face.

Gabriel Maitland stood in my kitchen with a bunch of tulips held at arm's length.

He looked from the stove to the table to the window over the sink.

"I'll be in the front room," said my assistant, who had been at the table with the crossword.

She was not going to the front room.

She was going to stand in the hall and listen.

The door swung shut behind her.

Gabriel put the tulips on the counter.

"Lantern Row," he said.

"Capital. We don't use the second word much," I said.

"You."

"Me," I said.

"You're the principal," he said.

"I'm the only principal. I have an assistant, two lawyers, and a bookkeeper who works from Maine."

He sat down at my kitchen table slowly.

"Fourteen months," he said.

"I know."

"Three law firms. A private investigator who followed a P.O. box to a UPS store in Quincy. A man I paid to tail a mail courier." He put a hand over his eyes. "I sent your counsel flowers, Dr. Selwyn."

"They were lovely. She kept them on her desk."

He started to laugh.

It was a helpless sound at first, and then it turned into the real thing, big and shaking, with his head down on his arm.

I had expected anger.

I had a speech ready for the anger.

"I came to this house to ask you for a favor," he said at last, wiping his eyes. "A favor, from a stranger. I had a speech."

"What was the favor?"

"Sixty more days for Winston." He sobered. "I'd walked out yesterday morning, so I couldn't buy the note. I thought whoever held it had rolled it six years without a word. That doesn't sound like a monster."

"It isn't. I'm not extending it."

He lifted his head.

"I know," he said. "I figured that out the moment you opened the door."

"His lawyers called my lawyers this morning," I said. "They wanted to know whether the note changed now that you'd withdrawn. They told us why." I looked at the floor. "Forty million dollars, Gabriel."

"I know the number."

"You did it before you knew who I was."

"I did it the night you kissed me in my own car," he said. "And you told me not to, and I did it anyway."

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