His Test Cost Him a Wife, Not a Negotiation novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Check
At the rehearsal dinner Dorinda is handed a $250,000 check and a prenup, refuses both and walks out; a Minnesota seat opens, she accepts, and the lobby video is already online.
At our rehearsal dinner, in front of forty guests, a server set a leather folder beside my wine glass.
Inside was a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Under the check was a prenuptial agreement dated that morning.
If I signed it, I would have no claim on anything after the wedding.
If I refused, I could take the check and go.
Winslow sat beside me with his hands folded and said nothing.
Across the table, his brother's widow raised her glass.
"Every woman in this family goes through the test," Rosalind said, and smiled at the room. "I did."
"True sincerity isn't proven with words, Dorinda. If you love him, a piece of paper won't scare you."
Forty faces turned to me.
I waited for Winslow to say this was enough.
He nudged the folder an inch closer to my plate.
"Sign it," he said. "If you really love me, you won't be afraid of this."
Four years, and he had turned it into a sum.
I had paid half of this wedding myself, forty-one thousand dollars, because from my first week in Boston everyone had decided I was after the money.
His family had owned buildings here for four generations.
My father fixed school buses in Beckley, West Virginia.
Winslow knew all of that, and he had priced me anyway.
If I took the check, I was exactly what they said I was.
If I signed, they could question me for the rest of my life and call it family.
If I did neither, they would say I wanted more.
There was no answer that proved anything to people who had already decided.
I closed the folder.
I stood up, and my chair scraped on the floor.
Nobody laughed, and nobody spoke.
I walked through the dining room and into the hotel lobby, and I heard heels behind me.
Rosalind's voice carried across the marble.
"She won't take the money, and she won't sign. Walking out is the smartest play she has."
A woman by the front desk lifted her phone.
Then a man in a tux did, and then three more, all of them pointed at my face.
"She's waiting for him to run after her," someone said.
"Now that's a negotiation," a man laughed.
Rosalind kept going, loud and warm, and the phones kept rising.
She said I was refusing the money to play the victim.
She said I wanted the whole Whitstable fortune and not just a husband.
I walked faster.
Winslow caught my hand from behind.
"Stop this," he said. "Everyone is watching. Do you really have to embarrass me?"
I turned and looked at him.
I wanted to ask why he had not once considered that I was the one being embarrassed.
Then I saw his face, and I lost the wish to ask.
A man who needed to test me before he could marry me would never understand the question.
I pulled my hand free.
"The wedding is off," I said.
Rosalind clapped her hands together once.
"You see?" she told him. "I said she'd use the wedding to threaten you."
The people around us started reassuring him.
They said I only wanted a promise, and that if he took the prenup back and coaxed me a little, I would come home.
Winslow's shoulders loosened.
The worry left his face, and he looked sure of himself.
"All right," he said. "I'll withdraw the agreement tomorrow. Happy now?"
The cold went through me then.
"I'm not negotiating with you," I said.
His face tightened. "Then what do you want?"
"Nothing. Including you."
His face finally fell.
Rosalind was still smiling. "It's her last move, Winslow. Four years of waiting. She can't actually leave."
"Fine," he said, and his voice had gone hard. "You always said you could go back to West Virginia. Go."
I turned and walked out through the revolving door.
In the back of a rideshare, my phone buzzed.
It was an email from the University of Minnesota, sent to my personal address, not my school one.
My school address had forwarded to Winslow's laptop for four years, because he set it up in the first week and said I would never keep up with it myself.
The email was from a man I had never heard of.
A place in the statistics PhD program had opened, with full tuition and a living stipend.
I had given up this same chance twice before.
Both times Winslow had told me not to throw our future away over a degree.
I read the email once, and I did not hesitate.
I typed: "I accept."
The answer came before the car left the curb.
"Seat held until Friday noon. Come now. Soren Halvorsen, Statistics Admissions."
Then my phone buzzed again, over and over.
The lobby video was already online.
The caption said: Fiancee turns down $250K and walks out, holding out for the whole fortune.
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