My Best Friend Bought Me a Cursed Life novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Dinner With the Old Man

Annie refuses her 81-year-old suitor at the dinner table, and her father tells her the trust is spent.

I didn't wash my face.

I put a hand towel on my forehead, took Daisy's purse from the hall table and walked out the front door.

"Where are you going?" my mother called after me.

"To get stitches," I said. "Hold dinner."

Jenna floated after me down the steps of the townhouse.

"You're wasting time," she said. "They'll be furious."

"They're already furious," I said. "Now they'll be furious and I'll have a medical record."

A man waiting for a cab heard me talking to the air and moved down the block.

At the ER on East 77th, a tired doctor put three stitches into my hairline.

"How did this happen?" she asked.

"My brother threw a crystal ashtray at my head," I said. "He's twenty-one. Please write that down exactly."

She looked at me for a long second.

Then she wrote it down.

Two curtains over, a nurse was picking crystal splinters out of Bradley's bandaged palm while he cried for his mother.

I waved at him on my way out.

At the townhouse I found the butler polishing glasses in the pantry.

Daisy's memories told me two things about him.

He'd worked for the grandmother for thirty years, and my father had installed cameras in every room to make sure the staff didn't steal teaspoons.

"The library camera," I said. "I'd like a copy of this afternoon on my phone. All of it."

He put down the glass.

He didn't ask a single question.

Ten minutes later the whole thing was in my pocket, ashtray first.

At eight o'clock I came down to dinner in a cashmere sweater with a bandage on my head.

The fiancé was already seated.

He was eighty-one years old.

He had a tan the color of a saddle and a hearing aid he kept adjusting.

When I sat down, he looked at me.

"She's thinner than her pictures," he said to my mother.

"She's been dieting," my mother said. "For the wedding."

Bradley sat across from me with his right hand wrapped up.

He wouldn't look at me.

Above the chandelier, Jenna draped herself sideways in the air.

"He has cold hands," she said. "You'll find out. He likes to put them on the back of your neck while he watches the stock ticker."

I ate my soup.

I smiled at the old man.

"I hear you live on Central Park South," I said.

"Top floor," he said. "You'll love the terrace."

"Is the railing high?" I asked.

My father put down his spoon.

The old man laughed. "High enough."

"It isn't," I said pleasantly. "Your next bride is going to find that out. She goes over it about a year after the wedding."

The maid serving the fish stopped with the platter in midair.

My mother's smile didn't move, but her knuckles went white on her napkin.

"Daisy has a dark sense of humor," she said.

"Daisy has a concussion," Bradley muttered.

"Daisy has a knife," I said, "and she isn't marrying anyone."

Jenna sat bolt upright in the air.

"Annie, shut up," she hissed. "You don't know what they do when you say no."

I knew exactly what they did.

She'd told me, screaming, from a roof.

The old man dabbed his mouth with his napkin.

"Young lady," he said, "your family owes my company forty million dollars. I've offered to forgive it. You're the bow on the package."

"Then you've been sold a box with nothing in it," I said.

I turned in my chair so the staff along the wall could hear me clearly.

The butler. Two maids. The cook in the doorway.

"I'm saying this in front of witnesses," I said. "I will not marry this man. Not in June, not ever. If anyone signs a paper that says otherwise, they signed it without me."

Nobody moved.

Then the cook, very quietly, went back into the kitchen and let the door swing shut.

The old man stood up.

He didn't look angry.

He looked like someone who'd been outbid at an auction and knew the second bidder would run out of money first.

"Call me when she's calmer," he told my father.

My father walked him to the door.

When he came back, he didn't sit.

He held out his hand to me, palm up.

"Your phone," he said.

"No."

He shrugged, took out his own phone and tapped it four times.

Daisy's phone buzzed in my pocket.

Then again. Then again.

Card declined. Card frozen. Account suspended.

"Every card in your name runs through the family office," he said. "As of now, they're closed."

"Then I'll use the trust," I said.

My mother finally laughed.

My father leaned down until his face was level with mine, close enough that I could smell the wine.

"There is no trust, darling," he said. "It's empty. Spent."

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