The Billionaire's Fight For Redemption novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Morning After the Anniversary
Rosalind's mother finds Anneliese in Ansel's bed on the anniversary of Rosalind's death; Ansel calls it a mistake and Anneliese walks out to find an eviction notice on her shop door.
At 7:40 on the second anniversary of my best friend's death, her mother walked into her husband's bedroom holding the memorial program.
I was in his bed.
I had no clothes on under his sheet, and my dress was on the floor by her left shoe.
Constance stopped. His assistant stopped behind her with a tray of coffee.
For a second nobody spoke.
Then Constance smiled at me.
"Oh, Anneliese, honey. Don't get up," she said. "I'm so glad he wasn't alone today."
She set the program on the dresser and came around the bed. She squeezed my hand through the sheet, and her fingers were warm.
"Rosalind would have wanted you with him," she said. "You were her best friend."
My eyes stung.
I had braced for a scene, and she had given me kindness instead.
Then she kept holding my hand and said, lightly, "Sweetheart, did Roz ever leave anything with you? A letter, a keepsake. Anything at all?"
"No," I said.
My bag was on the chair by the window. I leaned over, hauled it onto my lap and held it there.
The manila envelope I carried to the cemetery every October 28 was inside it.
I hadn't opened that envelope in two years.
Beside me the mattress shifted.
Ansel Buckingham sat up. His dark hair was flat on one side, and the scar through his left eyebrow was white in the gray light.
He looked at his mother-in-law. He looked at his assistant, Hal.
He looked at me last, and everything in his face closed.
"Get her out of my house," he said.
"Ansel," Constance said softly.
"It was a mistake." He said it to Constance, not to me. "It was nothing. I was at her grave for six hours and I wasn't thinking."
Hal studied the carpet.
Last night I had walked into the cemetery at midnight, the way I did every year, and he was already there.
For two years he had left before I came.
This time he stood by the headstone with his hands hanging at his sides, and he didn't tell me to go.
I had loved this man since I was twenty-two years old, and I had never once said so.
It had taken him one sentence to make it nothing.
"Fine," I said.
I slid out of the bed with the sheet around me and picked up my dress.
Nobody looked away. Constance's eyes were wet and kind. Hal's were on the floor.
I put the dress on, zipped it myself and found one shoe by the door and the other under the bed.
Ansel watched me do all of it.
"You're right," I said. "It was nothing."
His jaw moved.
I think he wanted me to cry. I think he wanted a scene he could be angry about, with her mother in the room.
I didn't give him one.
I didn't say Rosalind's name either, though it was sitting in my mouth. I had been holding it for two years, and I knew how to hold it a little longer.
I tucked my bag against my ribs and walked out of the bedroom.
So I stepped out.
Hal caught up with me at the elevator.
"Miss Deming." He held the door with one hand. "He doesn't mean it."
"He means it," I said. "He's meant it since the funeral."
"He hasn't slept in a bed since March." Hal pushed his glasses up. "Last night he slept."
"Tell him I'm glad," I said, and the doors closed.
It was twenty minutes by cab to Hale Street.
My shop sat on the corner under a green awning that said Deming & Co. Flowers. Rosalind had picked out the awning color herself, three years ago, when she gave me the lease for almost nothing.
There was a sheet of paper taped to the glass door.
I peeled it off with my thumbnail.
NOTICE TO QUIT. The premises must be vacated within thirty days. Signed, Constance Aldous, Chair, Rosalind Buckingham Foundation.
At the bottom, a process server had stamped the date and time of delivery.
Today. 7:15 a.m.
Constance had taped this to my door twenty-five minutes before she walked into that bedroom.
Then she had held my hand and called me honey.
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