Too Late to Win Me Back, Mr. Billionaire novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: The Clause

Constance didn't hang up on me.

She came.

At four that afternoon she walked into the family lounge on the transplant floor in a cream wool suit, with a lawyer one step behind her carrying a leather folder.

The lounge had a coffee machine, a box of tissues, and two other families.

A grandmother knitting. A teenage boy asleep across three chairs.

Constance didn't look at any of them.

She sat down across from me and crossed her ankles.

"You look terrible," she said.

"I've been up for thirty hours."

"You've been up for thirty hours in your husband's opening-night gown and a man's work boots. Pierce told me."

Pierce wasn't here. He'd taken Kenzie home at nine in the morning, because she was "shaky."

The lawyer opened the folder and laid a document on the coffee table.

I knew it.

Six pages, cream paper, signed in blue ink the week before my wedding.

I'd been twenty-six. Kit was nineteen and had pneumonia for the third time that winter.

Constance had brought it to my apartment herself, with a casserole.

"Read it to her," Constance said.

The lawyer cleared his throat.

"Section four. For the duration of the marriage, the Delano Foundation shall provide for the medical care of Katherine Ingalls, including nursing, equipment, specialist visits and..."

"I know what it says."

"Section seven," Constance said. "Read section seven."

"Support under this agreement ends upon divorce, legal separation, or any conduct by Mrs. Delano that, in the sole judgment of the Foundation's chair, brings embarrassment upon the Delano family."

"The Foundation's chair," Constance said. "That's me."

The knitting grandmother had stopped knitting.

"You wrote my sister's life into a contract," I said. "With yourself as the judge."

"I wrote a charity agreement. Generous, by any standard. Nine thousand dollars a month, Darcy, for five years."

"I know the number."

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