The Arrangement novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Buyout

I left Caspar asleep with a note on the pillow and ran up College Hill in yesterday's clothes.

The Coastal Processes Lab is on the third floor of an old brick building with a bad elevator and a view of the river.

I took the stairs two at a time.

When I came through the door, there were nine people in the room and not one of them was working.

Clive Kell stood by the whiteboard in his navy blazer with his hands clasped.

A gray-suited lawyer stood next to him with a leather folder.

My advisor sat at the end of the long bench with his arms folded and a look on his face I had never seen.

Four labmates were pressed against the wall by the sample freezer.

"There she is," Clive said warmly. "Josephine. We were just talking about you."

"Get out of my lab."

"It's the university's lab, I believe."

"Then get out of the university's lab."

He chuckled.

"I came to be fair. I know what this looks like, a girl with no stipend and a bursar's deadline. I would never judge."

My advisor's eyes cut to mine.

I felt my stomach go cold.

"My investigator stood behind you in the bursar's line last Monday," Clive said, pleasantly, to the whole room. "You paid nineteen thousand four hundred dollars in a single transaction. The Friday before, you had four dollars."

Someone by the freezer inhaled.

"I'm sure there's an explanation. I'd like to offer you a better one."

The lawyer opened his folder.

He drew out a check and a single typed page and laid them side by side on the lab bench, between a centrifuge and a box of sample jars.

The check was made out to me for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

The page was a statement.

I read three lines of it before I understood.

I, Josephine Pennock, state that I was paid by Caspar Kell to pose as his girlfriend.

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