They Called Me Barren, I Married a Billionaire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At a charity gala Cordelia toasts Mallory's baby and calls Leona barren, and Winston puts divorce papers on the table; Leona signs, steps out, and a stranger on the terrace says yes to one cruel condition: no children, ever.
My mother-in-law tapped a fork against her champagne glass, and two hundred people in the ballroom turned to look at her.
I was standing at her elbow in my green dress, holding a glass of wine I hadn't touched.
Earlier she had pinned a white orchid to my strap herself.
"Green is your color, darling," she had said, and patted my cheek.
My phone buzzed in my clutch.
It was my best friend since college, who was across the room in white.
She had texted me that morning to say she was on my side, whatever anyone said tonight, and to wear the green.
I looked up and found her.
She stood beside my husband with one hand flat on her stomach, and my mother-in-law's free hand rested on her back.
"Thank you all for coming to support the Stockbridge Children's Hospital Foundation," Cordelia Stockbridge said. "Tonight I have a different kind of announcement."
She smiled at the room.
"For six years my son and his wife have tried to give this family a child. We prayed. We paid for specialists. We paid for two rounds of treatment."
My face went hot.
I had told her about those rounds in confidence, in her own kitchen, crying.
"I've learned that some women simply cannot," Cordelia said, and she turned and looked straight at me. "Leona is barren. We have all been so kind about it."
A woman near the bar covered her mouth.
Somebody lifted a phone.
"But God is good," Cordelia said, and raised her glass. "Mallory Dane, who has been like a daughter to this family, is five months along with my son's child. To the Stockbridge heir. At last."
Glasses rose all over the room.
Mallory looked at the floor.
Not at me. At the floor.
Winston walked over to me, and his face was the one he wears when he's about to ask for something reasonable.
"Leo, please don't make a scene," he said quietly.
He slid a folder onto the cocktail table beside me and opened it to a yellow flag.
It was divorce papers, already printed and signed on his side, with the date left blank.
"Mom thought it'd be kinder to do it tonight," he said. "While everyone's here. So you don't have to go home to an empty house."
I read the page once.
Then I looked around at the phones, and at Mallory's white dress, and at the orchid on my strap.
Six years, and they had ended it before dessert.
So I picked up the pen from the table.
I signed on the line, and I wrote the date next to it myself.
"Leona," Winston said. "You didn't even read it."
"I read enough."
I twisted my wedding ring off my finger.
It left a pale line on my skin and I looked at it for a second.
Then I walked to Cordelia and dropped the ring into her champagne.
It sank with a small, clean sound.
"Congratulations on your heir," I said. "I hope he looks like you."
She stared at the glass.
Nobody laughed, and nobody clapped, and every phone in the room stayed up.
I walked out through the middle of them with my back straight.
So I stepped out.
The terrace doors were open, and the cold off the lake met my bare arms.
I made it to the railing before my knees went.
I gripped the stone and breathed.
"You dropped that well," a man said behind me.
I turned.
He was leaning on the far end of the railing in a black shirt with no tie, and a short dark beard.
I had seen him earlier at the donor table, the only guest who had never once looked at his phone.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know anyone was out here."
"I've been out here for the whole toast." He tilted his head toward the ballroom. "She's been saying that word about you in public for a long time, hasn't she."
"Six years."
"I'm Elias Hartwell."
I knew the name.
It was on the plaque in my school's reading room, which his family's foundation had paid for.
"I'm Leona Gerrish," I said. "Please don't be nice to me. I'll cry."
"I wasn't going to be nice."
He pushed off the railing and came a few steps closer.
"My grandmother is eighty-eight and in a hospital bed, and she wants to see me married before she goes. I need a wife by Friday. It would be a contract. One year."
I stared at him.
"I'm not looking for a husband," I said.
"I know. That's why I'm asking you."
He put his hands in his pockets.
"One condition. No children. Ever. I made sure of that at twenty-nine."
The wind moved my hair.
"And you just heard, in front of two hundred people, that you can't have any," he said. "So you're the only woman in that building this clause won't hurt."
It landed in my chest and stayed there.
It was a cruel thing to say, and it was also exactly true.
"That's the worst proposal I've ever heard," I said.
"Is it a no?"
Through the glass, Cordelia was fishing my ring out of her glass with a cocktail napkin, still smiling.
"If you say yes," Elias said, "she'll never get to say it about you again."
I looked at the man I had known for four minutes, and at the woman who had known me for six years.
"Yes," I said.
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