He Scorned His Substitute Wife, Now He Begs Her Back novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: No Three Million

At 3 a.m. Livia goes to her parents' penthouse for her payout and learns it was never hers. She refuses to keep lying, her mother disowns her, and Tierney's post blaming her goes viral.

The taxi driver wouldn't take her until she showed him she could pay.

Livia held out a fifty with a hand that was shaking and sticky with blood.

He drove her across the river with the heat on high and said nothing, and she was grateful.

The Carrano penthouse took up the top two floors of a building on the Upper East Side.

She had lived in it until she was five, and she had been back to it exactly four times.

At three in the morning the doorman looked at her head and called upstairs without being asked.

Her mother opened the door in a silk robe.

She looked at the blood on the gray coat and then at the marble floor.

"Not on the entry rug," her mother said. "It's Persian."

Livia stood on the marble.

"I came for my money."

"Keep your voice down. Your father is working."

"It's three in the morning."

"He's always working."

Her mother turned and walked into the living room, and Livia followed her because there was nowhere else to go.

"Aldo Benedetti called me at midnight," her mother said. "Do you know what he said?"

"No."

"That you put a girl in surgery."

"I didn't touch her."

"Then you did something. You always do something."

Livia didn't answer. She had heard that sentence in every year of her life that her mother had spoken to her.

"Mirella lands at seven," her mother said. "By then you will be back in that house in Sands Point, in your own bed, with a clean face and a clean story."

"I'll be where?"

"You will apologize to that girl, on camera if she wants it, and you'll cry."

"You are very good at being Mirella. Be her one more day, and then she'll step in and you can go."

Livia looked at the bruise coming up on her wrist, the shape of his hand.

"He pushed me down the stairs," she said.

"Men lose their tempers."

"Mother, he knew. He's known since the church. He knew I was not her."

For the first time, her mother's face changed.

It was not shock. Her mother was working out what the news would cost her.

"Then he'll keep it," her mother said slowly. "He's no fool. He needs the merger as much as we do."

"I want my three million."

Her mother laughed, a short, dry sound.

"What three million?"

"You promised me. On the phone. You said when it was over, I'd get the money from the prenup."

"The prenup was signed by Mirella Carrano, and so is the settlement. It goes to her trust."

"I was her for three years."

"You were paid. You were fed, you were dressed, you had a roof that most women would kill for." Her mother opened a drawer and took out a checkbook. "I had it ready for the end of the month. It's fifty thousand. There's also a bus ticket to Honesdale, since you like it there."

She tore the check out and held it between two fingers.

Livia didn't take it right away.

Behind her, a floorboard creaked.

Her father stood in the study doorway, in his reading glasses and an old cardigan.

He looked at her head. He opened his mouth.

"You should see a doctor about that," he said.

"Enough," her mother said, without turning.

He closed his mouth and went back into the study, and the door shut.

Livia took the check.

"I'll take the fifty," she said. "It's a down payment."

"There is no balance."

"There's a balance. I'll be back for it."

Her mother gave her the same look she had given her when she was five and had asked why she had to leave.

"If you say your name to anyone," her mother said, "if you tell a single person who you are, you are no one's daughter."

"I was never anyone's," Livia said.

She put the check in her coat pocket and the bus ticket on top of it.

At the door she took out her phone to call a car, because it was the only thing left to do.

It was already full of notifications.

The first was a post with two million views.

It was a photo of a hospital bed.

A woman lay in it with a cast on one leg and a bruise across her cheek, and her hair was spread neatly on the pillow.

Tierney Holloway had written under it: I don't want revenge. I just want people to know what Mirella Benedetti did to me tonight.

A man's hand held hers on the blanket.

Livia knew the cuff link. She had bought it.

The second post was the terrace photo, a woman in a man's black jacket, her hair wet, her face turned down.

Under it were a hundred thousand comments, all of them about her sister.

She did the arithmetic.

Mirella's plane landed at seven, and every photographer in New York would be waiting at the gate.

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