Not His Bride Anymore novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Elliot's POV

Elliot's POV:

I did not sleep.

At five I gave up and walked down the hall to the second bedroom.

The bed was made, because she had made it that morning, tight at the corners.

Her gray cardigan was still over the chair.

Her toothbrush stood in the glass by the sink.

She had walked out of the Netherland in a green velvet dress and gone wherever Savannah needed her to go.

She had not come back for any of it.

I understood that.

I stood in the doorway until the window turned from black to blue.

Then I went to the study and opened the Ambrose Inn file.

It was thick.

My father had signed the first page twenty-two years ago, with Helen Ambrose across the table from him.

Wray Freight hauled everything the Inn used, the linens and the wine and the kitchen steel and the furniture, on an exclusive contract that renewed every January unless one side cancelled by the fifteenth of December.

It was the fifteenth, the last day.

It was also a third of everything my company earned.

I read the clause twice, though I knew it by heart.

Then I took out a pen.

I could have told myself I was doing it for Ainsley.

I was not.

She had told me, in a back hall, in a voice, that I did not get to decide what she could take.

I had decided, anyway, for eight months.

If I used this to buy my way back, I would be doing the same thing again, with money instead of silence.

So I did not do it for her.

I did it because Helen Ambrose had bought a woman's life by the month, and I had eaten at her table and let the bill run.

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