He Left My Bed for His Secretary, So I Took His Brother novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Two Hundred and Twelve Dollars

Dolores finds the postnup was notarized in an office Leah never visited. Preston cuts her off, and Leah sees Mallory in his car outside.

By noon the video had two million views.

I knew because Dolores kept reading the number out loud from her laptop as she ate toast.

"Two point one," she said. "A man in Ohio wrote that he'd marry you. A woman in Texas wrote that she'd bury Preston, and she'd bring the shovel."

"Dolores."

"I'm only reporting the news."

She was fifty-eight, with gray curls and reading glasses on a chain. She had been a divorce lawyer for thirty years.

When I was twenty-two and waitressing at a diner on Lawrence Avenue, she tipped me forty percent every Friday and told me to never marry a man who talked about himself in the third person.

I had married Preston anyway.

Her spare room smelled of lavender and old paperbacks. I had slept in it for one night, on top of the covers, in my clothes.

An email chimed on her screen.

"There it is," Dolores said. "His lawyer sent the postnup."

She opened it and put her glasses on.

I sat across from her at the kitchen table and watched her read.

She turned the pages slowly. She read the signature page twice. Then she held the last page up to the window.

"That is your signature," she said.

"I know it is. I just don't remember signing anything."

"Dated October fourteenth, 2019."

I had to think. "That week I had my appendix out."

"Where?"

"Northwestern Memorial. They kept me four days."

Dolores looked at me over her glasses.

"Tell me about the day you signed."

I closed my eyes. It came back in pieces.

A white room. A drip in my arm. A morphine pump that I pressed too often.

Preston sitting on the edge of the bed with a folder.

"Insurance forms," he had said. "Sign where I flagged, Lee. Then you can sleep."

I had signed where the little yellow tabs were.

I told Dolores all of it.

She didn't say anything for a moment. Then she put her finger on the bottom of the page.

"There's a notary stamp here. It says you personally appeared before the notary at two-ten in the afternoon on the fourteenth, at an office on Wacker Drive."

"I was in a hospital bed."

"I know. A notary has to watch the person sign. If this one stamped a page without you in the room, the stamp is false."

She was smiling now, and it was not a kind smile.

"We call that a defect, sweetheart. You can win with it."

My throat hurt.

"How long?"

"A month if he cooperates. Six if he doesn't." She tapped the page. "He won't."

My phone buzzed on the table.

It was the bank. A text, two lines. Your joint account has been closed by the primary holder.

I opened the app. The card I'd used for ten years showed a red banner.

Then my phone buzzed again.

It was the housekeeper at Lake Forest, who had always been kind to me.

I'm so sorry, Mrs. Corbin. Mr. Corbin changed the gate codes this morning and told me not to let you in. He said you're not to take anything.

I read it twice.

"He locked me out of my own house," I said.

"It's his house on paper until we prove otherwise." Dolores shut the laptop. "How much do you have of your own?"

I checked the one account my father had left me, the one Preston never touched because it was too small to bother with.

"Two hundred and twelve dollars."

Dolores laughed once, hard.

"Good. Poor people win more fights than rich ones. They've got nothing to lose and a lot of free time."

I laughed too, and it came out wrong. It turned into something else.

She came around the table and held my head against her cardigan.

"Cry for five minutes," she said. "Then we're going to make a list."

I cried for five minutes.

Then we made a list.

Dolores wrote it on the back of a pizza menu.

One, get the hospital records for October 12 to 16. Two, find the notary and his journal. Three, subpoena the accounts for the Gold Coast lease. Four, find out who else knows about the cards.

I looked up.

"Who else?"

"A man who spends twenty-six thousand a month on a girl doesn't do it alone." She wrote a fifth line. "There's a bookkeeper, a driver, a doorman. Somebody saw something and said nothing, and they'll talk when they're asked right."

I stood up to put the kettle on.

The window over the sink looked onto Dolores's narrow street. Two parked cars, a maple tree, a fire hydrant.

A black Bentley was parked across from the hydrant.

I knew the plate. I had picked out the dealership's leather myself.

The driver's door opened.

It was not Preston.

Mallory Quince climbed out, in a pink suit and sunglasses, and leaned against the car.

She was wearing my camel coat, the one I had left on the hook in the front hall.

She looked up at Dolores's window and smiled at me.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

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