I Broke Up With My Poor Boyfriend to Date a Rich Heir novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gala
Stevie ends it with Caleb at the Thayer Foundation benefit and sees him pay an envelope of cash to the Thayer driver on the steps.
I ended it with Caleb at a charity benefit, in front of two hundred people and a string quartet.
I had not planned to do it there.
I had planned to do it on Sunday, in our kitchen, with the door closed and the coffee made.
Then the quartet stopped between songs, and I saw him in the ballroom doorway.
He was still in his work shirt, gray with dock dust, holding a white pharmacy bag.
Every head near the door turned to look at him.
Warner's hand rested on the small of my back.
"Is that him?" Warner asked quietly.
"That's him."
I put my glass down on a passing tray and walked across the floor in a green dress his mother had sent to my door.
Caleb watched me come.
He was twenty-eight and he looked tired in a way that sleep had stopped fixing.
"Your mom called me," he said. "You left your phone in the coat check, and she's out of her evening pills."
He held out the bag.
"You didn't have to bring them tonight," I said.
"She needed them tonight."
He said it gently.
It made this harder, and I had known it would.
"Stevie, dear."
Marguerite Thayer had come up beside us in a navy dress and pearls.
She was Warner's mother, fifty-eight, and she had been kind to mine from the first day, sending a driver for her clinic days and flowers to her chair.
Her late husband's father, Augustus Thayer, had founded the hotels and this foundation, and he was too frail to come tonight.
She took the pharmacy bag from Caleb's hand and thanked him.
"Caleb, thank you for coming all this way," she said. "Please, someone get this young man a plate."
I hadn't told her his name.
Warner must have, I thought, and let it go.
Caleb shook his head. "I can't stay. I just came to bring these."
"Then say what you came to say to her," Warner said, stepping in beside me. "Or she will."
Caleb looked at him, and then at me.
"What's he talking about, Steph?"
Warner's voice was low and warm in my ear.
"A clean break, today, is kinder than a slow one. You said so yourself."
I had said so.
I had said it Thursday, in his car, with the clinic's letter folded in my purse.
My mother's dialysis plan had lapsed, and the new one cost four thousand two hundred a month.
I made twenty-nine hundred, and Caleb gave most of his pay to something he called catch-up rent.
Warner's family could pay it and not feel it.
"Caleb," I said. My voice shook, so I made it steadier. "I'm ending this."
He didn't move.
Around us the ballroom had gone very quiet.
"I've met someone," I said. "I'm with Warner now. I'm sorry you had to find out like this."
A woman near us set down her fork.
Caleb's eyes went to Warner's hand on my back, and stayed there.
"Is it about your mom's treatment?" he asked.
"It's about me. I can't keep living on nothing."
It was the cruelest sentence I'd ever said, and I said it because it was the one most likely to end the conversation.
His jaw moved once.
"Okay," he said.
That was all.
He didn't argue, and I hated him a little for it, and then I hated myself more.
He took one key from his pocket, the key to our studio over the laundromat, and pressed it into my palm.
"Tell Donna I'll still do her Tuesday ride," he said.
Then he turned and walked out through the doors with every guest watching him go.
So I stayed where I was.
Warner kissed my temple. "You did that so well."
"I told him it was about me," I said. "I didn't say a word about my mother."
"That was kind," he said.
Through the tall front windows I could see the steps of the hotel and the dark street.
Caleb had stopped halfway down.
He took a thick envelope from inside his jacket.
A black car idled at the curb with the Thayer crest on its door, and the driver stepped out and took the envelope from his hand.
Neither of them said a word, and the driver put it in his coat without counting it.
I turned to Warner. "Why is Caleb giving your driver money?"
He glanced at the window and shrugged.
"We own half the east side," he said. "He probably rents from us. Small world."
Marguerite smiled at me and tucked her clutch under her arm.
"Come, dear," she said. "Let me introduce you to the board."
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