Runaway Princess Bride novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Four Hundred Thousand

At a motel she finds the contract that sold her and her mother lies on the phone about Eli. Clinton's truck pulls in.

"Dad," I said, "you knew."

I said it into the phone, and my father heard the change in my voice.

"Delaney, don't be dramatic," he said. "It's a marriage. People do it every day."

"He tore my dress."

"He's a man who just paid for you. Be smart about it."

I hung up before he could say my name again.

The stranger drove on without looking at me, and the wipers beat time against the rain.

"I'm Delaney," I said, because I could not think of anything else.

"I know," he said. "I'm Tristan."

"Tristan what?"

"Just Tristan, for now."

I should have pushed.

But my arm still hurt where Clinton had twisted it.

A man who gave me his jacket and asked for nothing felt safer than the family I was running from.

He pulled into a motel off the highway, a long gray building with a buzzing vacancy sign.

A big man in a quiet black coat stepped out of a car two spaces over and took a bag from the trunk.

"My driver," Tristan said.

The driver handed me the bag without a word.

Inside were jeans, a sweater and a pair of sneakers in my size.

I looked up at Tristan.

"You had clothes for me?"

"My driver bought them at the gas station on the way," he said. "He's fast."

It was a flat answer, with nothing hidden in it that I could hear.

He got me a room at the end of the row, and he stayed outside the door.

I changed in the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.

My lip was split.

There were four red marks on my wrist in the shape of Clinton's fingers.

I touched them and did not cry.

When I came out, Tristan was holding his phone out to me.

"You wanted your brother," he said.

I took it.

Eli is nine.

He is my father's son and my mother's son.

He has been mine since the night he was born, when my mother was too tired to hold him and I was thirteen.

I called our landline.

It rang six times.

Then my mother's cell, which I knew by heart.

"Hello?" Her voice was bright and fake, the voice she used on the church ladies.

"Mom, where's Eli?"

"Delaney! Thank God." She dropped the brightness at once. "Where are you? Clinton's in the emergency room. Do you understand what you've done?"

"Where's Eli?"

"He's at the house with the neighbour, where he belongs. He's perfectly fine."

"Put him on."

"He's asleep."

It was four in the afternoon.

"Mom."

"Here is how this works," my mother said, slow and clear. "You come home tonight and you tell Clinton you panicked. He'll forgive you, because I've explained you're high-strung. And Eli stays fine."

Eli stays fine.

She had said it twice.

"Is that a threat?" I asked.

"It's a mother giving advice."

I ended the call.

My hands would not stop shaking.

Tristan stood very still at the door.

"I need to see what they signed," I said. "I need to know what I was sold for."

He held out the phone again.

"My mother's email," I said. "The password is Eli's birthday. She's never changed it in ten years."

He turned his back politely while I typed.

The inbox loaded.

I searched for Clinton, and the first result was an email from a law firm, dated three weeks ago.

SETTLEMENT AND MARRIAGE AGREEMENT, MR. CLINTON STROUD AND THE WISNIEWSKI FAMILY.

I opened it.

There were three pages, and every line was written by a lawyer who thought I would never read it.

The Wisniewskis would deliver their daughter, Delaney, to the ceremony of Mr. Stroud's choosing.

Mr. Stroud would pay four hundred thousand dollars in two installments.

Half on signing.

Half on the day of the wedding.

The Wisniewskis' debts to Mr. Stroud's lender would be forgiven.

The bride's consent was not mentioned once.

At the bottom were my mother's signature and my father's, in blue ink.

I read it again to make sure it said what it said.

Then I put the phone down on the bedspread very carefully.

"My parents are professional liars," I said. "I knew that. They ran fake charities. They sold a house they didn't own once. But I thought I was the one thing they weren't lying about."

Tristan came back from the door.

He didn't touch me.

He said, quietly, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be nice to me," I said. "I'll break."

"Then I won't be nice."

His mouth moved, almost a smile.

"I'll be useful. What do you need first?"

"Eli," I said. "I need my brother out of that house."

"Then we'll get him."

Outside, a truck turned off the highway into the motel lot.

The headlights swept across the curtain and lit the whole room white.

Tristan went to the window and looked out.

His whole body changed.

"That's a truck with a plow on the front," he said. "Is that his?"

I came up beside him and looked.

Clinton Stroud climbed out of the cab with a white bandage wrapped around his head.

Two men climbed out behind him.

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