They Trashed My Books, So I Rewrote My Life novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Red Stickers
At the housewarming for the house only she owns, Natalie watches Dalton pay a crowd to strip her study and closet, is thrown out by guards, and drops her ring on the lawn.
Eighty guests stood in my living room holding red stickers, and Dalton's best friend Amber was the one who took my keys.
I had walked in from work ten minutes earlier to a housewarming I hadn't planned.
Amber met me in the hall, took my bag off my shoulder, and put a glass of wine in my hand.
"You look wrecked, Natalie," she said. "Sit down, I'll find you a plate."
She hung my coat on the hook herself and asked how the interview went, and she laughed in the right places when I told her.
The house was mine, bought fourteen months ago, and Dalton had moved in after he proposed.
He had let his friends call it his place for five months.
Then Amber climbed three steps of the staircase with a microphone, and the big wall screen behind her showed a running total.
"Everything of Natalie's costs five hundred dollars," she said. "Whoever carries it out fastest gets paid on the spot."
The crowd whooped.
"It's a test," Amber said. "We're finding out if she's cut out for our world."
She leaned on the word our.
A man slapped the first red sticker on my antique reading chair, the one I'd saved a year to buy.
Two guests lifted it over their heads and marched it out the front door.
Dalton thumbed his phone and smiled at them.
The wall screen flashed: Payment Successful, $500.
The room applauded.
I started toward the door, and Dalton caught my arm above the elbow.
"She's just livening things up," he said into my ear. "Don't do this here, Nat."
I had heard that sentence for three years.
The week before my biggest job interview, Amber had shoved my laptop into a swimming pool, and Dalton said she was helping me relax.
At Thanksgiving, she told his whole family how I grew up on church-basement dinners and one charity coat each December.
The coat woman came to our door every year, and my mother never let her past the step.
Amber told it like a punchline, and Dalton told me I couldn't take a joke.
Now guests were flooding into my study, slapping red stickers across the shelves.
"Three thousand and we'll clear the whole library tonight!" somebody yelled.
I looked at my fiancé.
"Dalton, if you pay them to empty my study, I'm done."
Amber snorted into the microphone. "Don't be a buzzkill, Natalie."
Dalton frowned at me, annoyed that I was spoiling his night.
"It's a game," he said.
His phone buzzed in his palm, and the wall flashed: Payment Successful, $3,000.
The room roared.
He smiled at me then, certain I would swallow this one like all the others.
The anger left me all at once, and what was left was cold and quiet.
If I called the police tonight, eighty people would swear it was a game, and Dalton would call me upset.
I wanted one thing none of them could laugh off, and that took more than tonight.
Amber raised the microphone again. "Now the grand finale! Somebody clear out Natalie's closet!"
The crowd surged up my staircase.
I ran after them, but two security guards in black jackets put out their arms.
"Move," I said. "This is my house."
One of them took my wrist.
"Dalton," I said. "Make them stop."
He didn't answer me.
He tilted his head toward the guards.
"Please walk her outside," he said. "She needs to calm down."
They dragged me toward the door, and my heel caught the threshold.
The guard twisted my arm up behind me, and pain shot through my shoulder.
They shoved me out onto the porch, and a cheer went up inside.
Through the open door I watched Dalton step beside Amber, laughing.
She raised her hand, and he slapped it.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
It was Hattie: Shop's CLOSED. Amber swore it was open till nine. I'm 90 minutes away. Hold on.
A second-floor window flew open.
A pair of my heels sailed out and clattered across the front steps.
Then my dresses came, my coats, my handbags, all of it landing on the wet lawn.
I stood in the middle of it, shaking.
"Stop it!" I screamed. "This is trespassing!"
Amber laughed into the microphone.
"The bride is role-playing, everybody! The poor tenant, evicted from her luxury home!"
The crowd howled.
She nudged Dalton. "Doesn't a performance this good deserve a bonus?"
He pulled out his phone and tapped it.
Through the front window I watched the wall flash: Payment Successful.
Another box of my clothes came out of the window.
A gray cardigan drifted down after it and landed in a puddle.
It was my mother's, a man's cardigan far too big for her, with the cuffs worn thin.
It was the only thing of hers I owned, and I had never been able to wear it.
"Dalton!" My voice cracked.
He looked at the cardigan, and the smile finally fell off his face.
"That's enough!" he shouted up at the house.
Only then did the noise inside die down.
He took off his suit jacket and walked across the lawn toward me.
I thought he was finally coming to me.
Amber sneezed, loudly, from the porch.
"God, Boston nights are freezing."
Dalton stopped.
He turned around and put his jacket over her shoulders.
She shrugged it off and held it out to him. "Take it back. I'm not fragile like some people."
"Wear it," Dalton said, and tugged the collar closed under her chin.
I laughed.
I picked a wool coat off the grass, shook the wet leaves from it, and put it on.
Then I took off my engagement ring.
Dalton caught up with me, closing his hand around my wrist.
"Where are you going? The party isn't over."
I looked at the mud and the clothes and the open window.
"You think I can sleep in this house tonight?"
"Get a hotel," he said lightly. "I'll have somebody clean up tomorrow."
I dropped the ring on the lawn beside my mother's cardigan.
Then I picked up the cardigan.
"Don't be dramatic," Dalton said behind me. "You'll be back by breakfast. You always are."
He was right about the breakfast part.
The deed to that house had only my name on it.
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