My Family Wants Me Gone, I Take Their Luck With Me novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Three Days

Noelle spends the first of three days cutting every tie, and her family summons her to their press conference.

"Reviewing?" my father said. "What do you mean, reviewing? We signed in March."

His voice carried down the drive.

I stopped with one hand on the iron gate.

"Harbor Tower is fully financed. I don't care what the board in Geneva thinks. Call them back."

Something heavy hit a table inside the house.

My mother said my name. Not to call me back. Just to say it, the way you'd say "rain."

I opened the gate and walked through it.

Nobody came after me.

The hill road had no sidewalk. I walked on the shoulder with my train over my arm, and cars slowed to look.

My phone was in the hidden pocket of the gown. My bank card was in the phone case.

That was everything I owned that wasn't theirs.

The card was for the only account in my own name. Six years of salary from writing my father's press releases.

I called a cab from the bottom of the hill.

The driver looked at the gown, then at my face, then at the empty road behind me.

"Wedding?"

"Canceled."

"Sorry."

"Don't be. It was the eighteenth."

He drove me to the cheapest motel I could think of, a low pink place by the highway called the Seabreeze Motor Inn.

There was no sea anywhere near it.

The clerk behind the glass took my card and didn't ask about the dress.

I slept in it on top of the covers, because I couldn't reach the buttons down my back.

At six in the morning, I woke up to the TV I'd forgotten to turn off.

A business anchor was talking over a red arrow.

"Penhurst Holdings opened down four percent after reports that lenders on the Harbor Tower project have asked for a review. The company says the project is secure."

The company was my father. The statement was in my words. I had written that sentence for him a dozen times.

I turned the TV off.

Day one.

I found a pen on the nightstand and wrote on the motel notepad.

Kessington shares.

The trust.

The family cards.

Second Grade Pictures.

Four lines. That was all it took to tie me to them.

I got the gown off by tearing two buttons, and the third one rolled under the bed.

Next door to the motel was a consignment shop with a mannequin in the window wearing a prom dress.

The owner was a woman about my mother's age with reading glasses on her head.

She touched the lace on my sleeve like it might be warm.

"This is couture."

"It's also for sale."

"Honey, are you sure? People come back for these."

"Not this one."

She paid me nine hundred dollars and threw in a pair of jeans, a gray sweater and canvas sneakers.

I walked out of her shop dressed.

At the bank downtown, I asked to close every account that had my father's name on it.

The teller called a manager. The manager called my father's private banker.

My father's private banker came down the stairs smiling at me.

"Noelle. Let's not do anything we'll regret. Your father hasn't authorized..."

"He doesn't have to. I'm closing my access, not his money."

I took the black card out of my phone case.

I asked the teller for scissors.

She handed them over with her eyebrows up.

I cut the card in half on the counter. Then the gold one. Then the one for the house account.

The pieces lay on the marble.

"Shred those for me, please," I told her.

She swept them into her palm and smiled for the first time.

On the bench outside, I sent two emails from my phone.

The first went to Kessington Global's lawyers. Damon had given me five percent of the company the night he proposed. I gave every share back.

The second went to the Penhurst family lawyer. I renounced the trust.

Two signatures with my finger on a cracked screen.

I crossed out three lines on the notepad.

My phone rang before I'd put the pen away.

Saffron.

I almost let it ring.

I didn't, because for eighteen years I never had.

"Do you know you're trending?" she said. "Clarissa didn't sleep at all. She threw up twice."

"She has a sensitive stomach. I've heard."

"Don't be like that. My publicist drafted your statement. Just post it and this all goes away by lunch."

"No."

The line went quiet.

Saffron had never heard that word from me. Not when she borrowed my car for a year. Not when she put my name on her company so the bank would take her seriously.

"We start shooting The Tidewater on Monday," she said. "I can't have this hanging over me. Don't make this about you, Noelle."

"I'm not. I'm making it about nobody."

"You'll come crawling back by Friday. You always do."

"Goodbye, Saff."

I hung up first.

My hand was shaking. I sat on it until it stopped.

A bus went by with an ad for her last movie on the side. Her face, ten feet tall, laughing.

I'd held her hand at that premiere because she was too scared to walk the carpet.

My phone buzzed again.

A text from my mother's number. My mother didn't text. Her assistant did.

Two o'clock, the Harbor Grand ballroom. Your father will speak. Come and sit quietly.

Then a second one.

If you don't come, he'll tell them you're in rehab.

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