Chapter 6: A Gift

We landed in Naples after dark.

My phone woke up with forty-one missed calls.

Dalton had called twenty-three of them.

Cal carried my bag to a dusty gray car in the parking structure without asking whether I wanted him to.

"My hotel is an hour up the coast," he said. "I have a room. It's yours until you have a better plan."

"I booked a room in town."

"You booked it on an app at five in the morning. Mine has a door that locks and a window that doesn't face a parking lot."

I got in.

He had barely pulled onto the road when the phone rang again.

DALTON.

"Don't," Cal said.

"If I don't, he'll keep calling."

I put it on speaker and set it on my knee.

"Mara." Dalton's voice was hoarse. "You've made your point."

"I haven't made one yet."

"You humiliated my mother in front of three hundred people."

"Your mother invited them."

"You will fix this," he said. "Tomorrow morning you'll call every vendor and put your card back on file."

"No."

"You owe us."

"I owe you nothing, Dalton. You owe me six hundred thousand dollars."

Silence.

Then he sighed, and the voice changed to the reasonable one, the one he used on contractors.

"About that. My lawyer pulled the paper you signed."

"What paper?"

"The night you gave me the money. At the kitchen table. You signed a receipt, page two."

I remembered it.

It was three in the morning, he had been crying, and I'd signed where he pointed.

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