Hit the Jackpot! My Broke Chef Husband Is a Billionaire novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Page Four
Rosie takes her sick mother's chair at a marriage signing, finds her stepfather's hidden clause, tears it up in front of everyone, and recognizes the broke chef's scar from a magazine about a secret billionaire.
My stepfather put my mother's good pen in my hand and told me to take her chair.
"She'd want you to sit," Dale said. "So sit."
My mother had been supposed to sit there.
At three that morning her kidneys had quit again.
Now she was hooked to a machine at St. John, with a nurse holding her phone.
The lawyer's office was above a bakery on Madison Avenue in Lakewood.
The whole room smelled like cinnamon and printer toner.
Across the table sat a tiny old woman in a purple tracksuit with a cane across her knees.
Her name was Maude Carberry, and she was seventy-eight, and she was looking at me.
Beside her stood her grandson.
He was enormous.
He had a shaved head, a black beard going grey at the chin, and a chef's jacket with a coffee stain on the cuff.
He didn't sit.
He looked at me, then at the stack of paper, then back at me.
"Miss Pickett," he said. "You can go. Nobody here is going to be mad."
"Ewan," said Maude.
"I mean it, Gram."
"I know you do. Hush."
Dale laughed too loudly.
"She's not going anywhere. She's a sensible girl."
I was twenty-six years old, and I had learned about this wedding at dinner the night before.
Dale had announced it between the pot roast and the peas.
My mother, he said, had written to the old woman three weeks ago and said yes for me.
I had asked my mother on the phone that night whether it was true.
She had cried and said yes, and then she had said she was sorry.
Then she had said she was tired of watching me tiptoe around that house.
So here I was.
I do consent forms for a living, so I read the whole thing the way I read those.
Page one was a plain agreement between the Carberry family and the Pickett family.
Page two said either of us could end it at any time, for any reason, and nobody would owe anybody a dime.
Page three said no money would pass between the families.
The old woman had underlined that line twice in blue pen.
"Nobody buys anybody in this family," Maude said, to the room. "I raised him better."
Page four was different.
The font was a little bigger, and the margins were off.
It said the undersigned released all claim to the residence at 1418 Hird Avenue.
I read it twice.
Then I read it out loud.
"That's standard," said Dale.
"It's my father's house."
"It's your mother's house."
"My father left it to her for her life, and then to me."
My voice was steady, and that surprised me.
"You know that, Dale. You were at the reading."
The lawyer leaned over and took the page from me.
He frowned at it for a long moment.
"This page isn't in my draft," he said.
Nobody breathed.
I watched Dale's face go the color of raw chicken.
"Clerical," he said. "Somebody mixed up the file."
"Somebody did," I said.
I took the page back from the lawyer and tore it in half.
Then I tore it again, and I dropped the pieces in front of my stepfather.
The chef made a small noise in his throat that was almost a laugh.
"Mr. Hubbard," he said, very calmly, "sit down, or I'll hold the door for you."
Dale sat.
I had never seen anyone make Dale do that in five years.
The lawyer put the phone on speaker.
"Mrs. Hubbard, can you hear us?" he asked.
"Noreen, honey," Maude called. "It's Maude."
"Rosie?" my mother's voice came out thin and small. "Baby, you don't have to do this."
"I know, Mom."
"He cooks. Maude says he's a good boy. If you hate him, divorce him by Christmas."
Maude cackled so hard she had to hold her cane.
I looked at the man across the table.
I wasn't going to marry him for money, because nobody had offered any.
I wasn't going to marry him for love, because I had known him for ten minutes.
I wanted out of Dale's house, and I wanted my mother to stop crying.
I wanted to see what kind of man says "I'll hold the door" like he means it.
"Where do I sign?"
The lawyer showed me.
I signed my name, Rosalee Pickett, in the blue ink.
Ewan signed under it.
He leaned across the table to do it, and his sleeve rode up his left forearm.
There was a burn scar on the inside of it, pale and shiny, curved like a comma.
I knew that scar.
Four weeks ago I had eaten a turkey sandwich in the break room at the dental office.
Somebody had left a business magazine on the table.
The article was about a company called Tern Hospitality, thirty-nine restaurants in nine cities.
Its founder had never given an interview and never been photographed.
The only picture was a close shot of his hands plating a dish, a scar curved across the left forearm.
I had read that article twice.
The man across from me was supposed to be too broke to pay his gas bill.
I capped my mother's pen and handed it back to Dale.
I didn't say a word.
He could tell me himself.
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