My Husband Played Stranger, So I Took Off the Ring novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Reporter

The reporter met us at the diner on Monday afternoon, at the counter stool nearest the register.

She was a small woman in her thirties with a beat-up notebook and a coffee she hadn't touched.

The owner had put a RESERVED sign on the stool before she asked, and then stood three feet away pretending to wipe a clean counter.

"I'll be straight with you," the reporter said. "Lionel Hargrove's lawyer sent me a dossier on Friday."

"What do they say?" Nate asked.

"That a waitress with a sick mother targeted a trustee's son." She looked at me. "That she took him for his name, and when his father offered her a fair settlement, she refused it on a stage to drive the price up."

I held onto the counter.

"That's a lie," Maisie said, from the next stool.

She had come straight from class, with her backpack still on one shoulder and a pen stuck in her curls.

"I know it's one-sided," the reporter said. "I'm asking for the other side."

"The other side is that he offered her two hundred thousand dollars to disappear, and she tore up the check in front of the Chancellor."

"I wasn't in the room."

"Two hundred people were."

"Then I'd like to talk to some of them." The reporter turned back to me. "There's a second page. It says Mr. Hargrove's son has been paying for your mother's care out of company money he wasn't entitled to."

Nate's face went hard.

"That's not true."

"He signed a contract that says you owed him three years of work. Your father says the money for the nursing home came out of the Care Foundation to cover what you took."

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