Divorce Me If You Dare: The Hidden Queen's Revenge novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Housekeeper
At the Farwell Capital gala Brooks announces his engagement to Delaney and calls his wife the housekeeper into a microphone. She dares him to divorce her, walks out and calls a saved number.
Brooks Farwell raised his glass on the ballroom stage and told three hundred guests he was getting married.
"To my fiancée, Delaney Rayburn," he said.
The room clapped.
Cora Farwell heard it from the service door, holding a steel thermos against her chest.
Inside was the ginger and licorice tonic for his stomach.
She had simmered it for two hours that morning, starting at 5:30, the way she had every morning for five years.
She had not missed a day.
Delaney stepped up beside him in a cream suit, holding out her left hand under the lights.
The diamond on it was square and enormous.
That afternoon Delaney had driven Cora here herself.
She had tucked a cardigan around Cora's shoulders in the car and said, "The ballroom runs cold, and you're always the one who forgets."
At breakfast Brooks had said, "Tonight is only business, Cora. Nothing changes between us."
Cora had believed him, because she had been believing him for five years.
When she married him there was no wedding, no ring, not even one flower on the courthouse steps.
He had said, "The timing isn't right. Let's wait a little longer."
So she had waited.
She had washed his shirts by hand and polished his shoes every Sunday night.
She had sat beside him quietly through every bad mood, and she had made him hangover tea when he came home drunk from dinners with investors.
In five years Brooks had never asked where she came from.
He had never asked what she did on the first Friday of every month, when she took the early train downtown.
He called it her book club and changed the subject.
Delaney leaned toward the microphone.
"Brooks, wait. Cora's tonics are the only thing that works on his stomach. She must be here somewhere."
Brooks scanned the room and found Cora at the door.
"There she is," he said, and smiled.
Three hundred heads turned toward her thermos and her gray dress.
"Everyone, this is Cora. She keeps my mother's house and makes my morning medicine. Our housekeeper."
Somebody laughed.
A woman at table four covered her mouth, and a waiter looked at the floor.
Phones came up across the room.
Cora's hands went cold around the steel.
Marguerite Farwell sat at the front table in her pearls, her own phone raised, filming.
Cora walked down the long carpet between the tables.
Nobody stopped her, because nobody had ever thought of her as someone who would need stopping.
She stood at the foot of the stage and looked up at her husband.
"I'm not your housekeeper, Brooks," she said.
Her voice carried, because the microphone was still live and Delaney was holding it near.
"I'm your wife."
The room went quiet.
Brooks laughed, short and easy.
"We signed a paper for my mother's sake. It was never a marriage. Cora, you're confused. Take the evening off."
"Cora, sweetheart," Delaney said softly. "Let's go sit down. Please."
She sounded kind, and she reached a hand down to help Cora up the steps.
Cora looked at the hand.
Then she looked at the cardigan on her own shoulders, and she took it off and laid it on the stage floor.
"Five years," she said. "No wedding. No ring. A license in the hall drawer with your name and mine on it."
"Sit down, Cora," Marguerite called from the front table. "You are embarrassing my son."
"He embarrassed himself," Cora said. "I only walked in."
A man near the front stopped filming and looked at his wife.
Brooks's smile thinned.
"Then divorce me, if that's what you want," he said. "Go on. You can't, can you? Where would you go? You'd have nothing."
He said it for the room, and the room laughed again, uncertain.
Cora set the thermos down on the edge of the stage.
"Drink your own medicine," she said.
Then she looked straight at him.
"Divorce me, Brooks. I dare you."
Nobody laughed this time.
"File it Monday," Marguerite said, loud and flat. "She'll be back by Tuesday with her bags."
Brooks nodded at his mother, and Delaney lowered her eyes to the ring.
Cora did not answer any of them.
She untied the faded apron she had forgotten she was wearing and dropped it on the floor beside the cardigan.
Then she walked back up the long carpet, past three hundred phones, and out through the ballroom doors.
Nobody followed her.
Behind her the band started up again, too loud, and a glass broke somewhere near the stage.
In the lobby she stopped at the revolving door and took out her phone.
She had a number saved under one letter and had never once called it.
It rang one time.
"Ma'am," said a man's voice, low and steady.
"It's time, Alexander," Cora said.
There was a pause, and then she heard him exhale.
"Everything has been ready for five years," he said. "Where are you?"
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