His Guilt Made Me A Billionaire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Top Step
Two of Beckett's starlets fight in a VIP lounge, one shoves Cora down the marble stairs, and Beckett signs over forty percent of his company out of guilt; then Tanya's video says Cora faked the fall for money.
Tanya Abbot caught my sleeve at the top of a marble staircase and said, "Cora, thank God, please make her stop," while sixty people filmed it.
Another woman had Tanya by the hair, and both of them were screaming about the same thing.
Which of them had the key to Beckett's door on Saturday nights.
I had a folder of confidentiality agreements under one arm and a checkbook in my jacket.
That was my whole job.
For six years I had leased Beckett's girlfriends their penthouses and paid off every fight they started.
I stepped between them with my hands up.
"Ladies. Nobody is losing a lease tonight. Put your hands down and we'll go to the office."
The other woman let go first and started to cry.
Tanya looked at me, then at the phones, and smiled.
"You're the help, Cora," she said. "You don't get to tell me where to stand."
She shoved me with both hands.
My heel caught the edge of the top step.
I fell down eleven marble stairs, and the last thing I heard was somebody saying "Oh my God" with a camera still pointed at me.
I woke up in a hospital bed with a cast on my wrist and a stitched cut on my hip.
Beckett was asleep in the chair beside me with his jacket over his knees.
He stayed six days.
He took every call from the corridor so I wouldn't hear his voice rise.
On the third day a doctor came in and sat on the edge of the bed with a closed file.
"Ms. Treacy, I need to go over the second page with you. Is Mr. Lowry family?"
Beckett looked up from the chair.
"I'll step out," he said.
"No," I said. "He's my employer."
The doctor waited.
I turned my face to the nurse by the door, a tall woman with a kind mouth.
"Page two doesn't go to him," I said. "Not now, not ever. Put it in writing."
She nodded and wrote it on the chart.
Beckett watched all of it from the chair.
He agreed to everything I asked that week, and he never asked me why.
On the sixth day I walked out of the hospital with a cane and a bag of painkillers.
I spent seven weeks on my brother Nate's couch, and Beckett sent flowers every Friday.
On the first Monday I could climb stairs again, I went to Lowry Holdings in a black dress and put a single sheet of paper on his desk.
It was my resignation.
Beckett read it standing up.
He read it twice.
Then he pressed a button on his phone and said, "Everyone to the boardroom, please. Now."
"Beckett, I'm not staying for a speech."
"Not a speech," he said. "Come."
The boardroom held nine directors, my cane clicking on the floor, and his sister Imogen at the far end with her arms folded.
Beckett did not sit down.
"Two months ago a woman I brought into my life put Cora down a flight of stairs," he said. "Cora has spent six years cleaning up after me, and she was almost killed for it."
Nobody moved.
"I'm transferring forty percent of Lowry Holdings to her. Today. The papers are on the table."
A director in a grey suit laughed once, and then saw that nobody joined him.
"Beckett. That's not a gesture. That's a fortune."
"It's a debt," Beckett said. "She can burn it if she wants. It's hers."
I looked at the stack of papers.
Forty percent of a company that owned nine towers and two hotel chains.
My rent last month had been eleven hundred dollars.
For six years I had sent his suits to the cleaners and his mother flowers, and I had lied for him to a dozen women.
And two months ago a girl in a silver dress had smiled while I fell.
I had come in to quit.
I looked at Imogen.
She raised one eyebrow and said nothing, which was her way of telling me it was my choice.
"I'm taking it," I said.
Beckett's shoulders dropped, and he sat down at last.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me yet. I want a seat on this board, and I want to start with the leases."
I took the pen.
The pen was heavy and cold.
I signed my name on every page, and nine people watched me do it.
When I put the pen down my phone buzzed on the table.
Then every phone in the room buzzed at once.
Imogen turned her screen toward me.
It was Tanya, in a white robe on a penthouse balcony, with the lounge video playing behind her.
The caption said: His assistant threw herself down the stairs for a payday. Ask her what she got.
Under it, four hundred thousand people had already watched.
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