Dallas Called My Ex Rich and Barren, So I Found Out He Was Neither novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Hundred Women
At the Heart Luncheon, Reyna pins her divorce decree to a velvet curtain in front of the whole room, and the ex-husband everyone calls sterile walks up the aisle, and she pulls him into the hotel's pastry cooler.
On Valentine's Day, four hundred women in pearls laughed at a joke about my ex-husband's sperm.
I stood at the service door of the hotel ballroom with eleven pins between my lips.
A judge had signed my divorce at nine that morning, and nobody in that room knew it but me.
The man at the microphone was a morning radio host with a spray tan and a pocket square.
"Folks say that tower of his hasn't moved a crane since October," he said.
"Folks also say the family hasn't moved on a certain other front."
The ballroom roared.
"The man can buy any building in town, ladies, but he can't buy an heir."
They laughed again, harder, and a woman at table six wiped her eyes.
Nobody at the luncheon looked at the woman who hemmed their dresses.
Then my mother-in-law looked at me.
Carolyn Kellum sat at table one in a triple strand of pearls, and she had chaired this luncheon for nineteen years.
She had been my mother-in-law for three of them.
I was the head of alterations at Tatum's, and I had spent the morning pinning models into spring gowns for her runway.
"Well, I can't say whose fault it is," she said, in the easy voice she used for bad news about other people.
She turned in her chair until she found me at the service door.
"Reyna, sweetheart, you're the one with the needle. Did you not hem him right?"
The laughter came from every table at once.
I took the pins out of my mouth and put them in my palm, one at a time.
Then I walked up the center aisle in my black work dress and my flat shoes.
The radio host saw me coming and grinned.
"Here she is, ladies," he said. "The woman herself."
He held the microphone out to me, smiling, sure I would play along.
I looked out at the pearls and the champagne and the little place cards with gold hearts.
"My name is Reyna Ybarra," I said.
The room got quieter.
"For three years I was Mrs. Levi Kellum, and for eight years I've taken up your hems."
I reached into my apron pocket and took out a folded paper.
"At nine o'clock this morning, a judge in Dallas County signed this."
I shook it open so they could see the seal.
Then I turned and pinned it through the stamp to the red velvet curtain behind the host.
I pushed the pin in with my thumb, all the way to the head.
"I'm single," I said. "And I'm not the reason for anything you've heard."
Carolyn's smile stayed where it was, but her eyes went flat.
"If you want to know who stopped coming to bed in that marriage, Mrs. Kellum, ask your son."
Nobody lifted a fork.
Then the back doors of the ballroom banged open, and four hundred heads turned.
Levi Kellum walked up the center aisle.
He was six foot three and he took the aisle in long strides, and he did not look at one table.
His gray suit hung off his shoulders and gapped at the waist.
I had hemmed that suit.
It had fit him in October.
He climbed the three steps to the stage, and he did not look at his mother or the curtain or the paper.
He looked at me.
His hand came over mine on the microphone, cold and rough, and he did not take it away.
I had not been touched by him in eight months.
I could not feel anything in that room but the back of my hand.
"She's right," Levi said into the microphone, in that low voice that always made a room lean in.
"I'm the one who stopped coming to bed."
A woman at the front gasped.
"She's not the reason for anything you've been told, and you all know it."
He looked down the aisle at the pearls.
"If any of you prints one word about her, or says her name next to that word, you'll answer to me."
He said it quietly, and nobody doubted him.
The radio host took a step back.
Levi turned to me.
I saw that his chipped front tooth was biting his lower lip, which he only did when he was in trouble.
"Come with me, Reyna," he said.
"I'm working," I said.
"You're not."
"I'm not," I agreed.
He opened his mouth to say something else.
I took his tie in my fist.
I walked him off the stage through the service door, past a row of dishwashers who stopped what they were doing.
We went down the back hall.
At the end of it was a steel door with a handle and a sign that said PASTRY, KEEP SHUT.
I pulled it open.
The cold hit us both, and the shelves inside were full of heart-shaped petit fours.
"Reyna," Levi said.
"Get in," I said.
He got in.
I shut the door behind us.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend