I Asked For Vet Bills He Offered Ten Million novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lawn
A Doberman pins Lacey's spaniel on her front lawn in front of the whole street, Silvan Waverley offers her ten million dollars, and she asks for the vet bills instead, until he texts that if she writes it down, he loses him.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in Pacific Palisades, in front of six of my neighbors, a black Doberman was humping my dog.
I know because every one of them was clearly visible on Dina's video.
Dina was on her porch across the street with her phone up.
She wasn't helping. She was zooming in.
I came out my front door barefoot with a spatula in my hand.
My brown butter pistachio pastry was in the oven, and it had already failed three times that week.
"Truffle!" I screamed.
My gate was standing open. The latch had stuck since spring, and I kept meaning to fix it.
The Doberman had Truffle flat on the grass.
Truffle is a fourteen-pound Cavalier King Charles spaniel with long silky ears and a red collar.
He was twenty-one months old, and nobody had touched him but me and the groomer.
The Doberman's hips were going, and his mouth was pulled back in a wide, pleased grin.
A small black camera was clipped to his collar, pointed straight at us.
Truffle's tail was wagging, which I took for shock.
"Get off him!" I swung the spatula.
The Doberman looked at the spatula, looked at me, and kept going.
A man ran through my open gate with a phone at his ear.
He was tall, with dark hair, a pale blue shirt and running shoes that still looked new.
"Gerald, off," he said, quietly.
The Doberman got off at once and sat down, still grinning.
Truffle lay in the grass and blinked.
The man said, "I'll call you back," into his phone and put it in his pocket.
He looked at the dog, at me, and at the spatula.
"I am so sorry. That is Gerald. He has never done this before. He has never touched another dog. Not once."
"Well, he touched mine," I said. "In front of the whole street."
"Understood. Let me fix this. Ten thousand dollars."
"I don't want ten thousand dollars."
"A million, then."
Across the street, somebody said, "Whoa."
"I want the vet bills," I said. "The exam, the consult, every receipt, to the cent."
"Ten million," the man said.
He said it louder than the million.
"Ten million dollars, today. My assistant can wire it in an hour."
"Lace, say yes!" Dina yelled from her porch.
"Dina, put the phone down!"
"I'm not recording," Dina yelled. She was recording.
I knelt and checked Truffle's legs, his ribs and his ears.
He licked my wrist and gave me a look I didn't understand yet.
"I'm Lacey Whitfield," I told the man, still on my knees. "This is Truffle. I'll send you a bill for what this costs. Not a cent more."
"I'm Silvan Waverley. I live two streets up. And more is fine. More is the point."
"It's not what it cost."
"It's a rounding error."
"Then you'll have no trouble with the exact number."
He opened his mouth. Then he shut it and looked at Gerald.
Gerald looked at Truffle and thumped his tail twice on my lawn.
"Please keep him away from my dog," I said.
"Of course. Gerald, heel."
Gerald got up and walked off at his heel without a leash.
Silvan gave me his number and I gave him mine.
He left at a walk, and then at a jog, and he kept looking back at my gate.
Dina told me the rest the second he was gone, loudly, from her porch.
Silvan Waverley had sold a scheduling app for three hundred and eighty million dollars.
At 6:40 that evening a gray van stopped at my curb.
The courier wore a suit. He handed me an envelope and waited while I signed for it.
Inside was a cashier's check made out to Lacey Whitfield for ten million dollars.
It had more zeros than I had ever held in my hand.
Behind it was a single page of paper that said I would not "request, keep or sign any written record of the incident."
I read it twice at my kitchen counter.
A vet bill is a written record. So is a receipt.
I thought about my father and the deck he built for a man with too much money.
That man paid him a bonus nobody asked for, and then spent six years collecting on it.
I scraped the burnt pastry into the trash, which made four failures that week.
Then I stuck the check to my fridge under a magnet shaped like a pistachio, and I went to look for Truffle's vet card.
So I turned down ten million dollars.
My phone buzzed on the counter. It was Silvan.
"Please just keep the check. I'll pay the vet too. But please don't write any of this down."
A second text came in before I could answer.
"If you write it down, I lose him."
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