Was Our Marriage Your Revenge? novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Five Million Pieces
Quentin admits the marriage was a plan to take her father's bank. Claire signs the divorce, tears the five-million check in front of his board, and learns in the elevator that she is twelve weeks pregnant.
My husband slid a check for five million dollars across the boardroom table while six of his executives watched.
"This is for the inconvenience," Quentin said. "I decided on Monday, and I won't drag it out. It's generous, and you know it."
I had come to the fourth floor of my husband's company because he asked me to sign something about the house.
Nobody told me the house was the divorce.
A lawyer I had never met sat at his right hand with a pen laid out for me.
His chief of staff stood at the window with a tablet, looking at anything but me.
The man who had raised Quentin after his own father died took the chair next to mine.
He put a clean handkerchief on the table in front of me before I had even started to cry.
"Take your time, dear," Gilbert said quietly.
I looked at my husband.
"Six years, Quentin. Why?"
He didn't look away, and that was the worst part.
"I married you to take your father's bank," he said. "Corr Capital is mine now. The board signed this morning."
Nobody in the room moved.
"The marriage was how I got in the door. It was never anything else."
I thought of the first Christmas, when he carved my father's turkey and laughed at my father's bad jokes.
I thought of the night he held my hair back when I had the flu.
I thought, he was working.
My throat closed up.
"You sat at his table for six years," I said.
"Yes."
"You let him call you son."
"Yes."
His voice was level the whole time.
The lawyer turned the first page toward me.
The divorce petition was already printed and tabbed in a cream folder with the name of Gilbert VanDerzee's law office on the cover.
The date at the top was three weeks old.
Quentin had just told the room he'd made up his mind on Monday.
I noticed it, and I put it down to somebody's typing mistake, because I could not hold one more thing.
His chief of staff, Gretchen VanDerzee, came over and set a second pen beside the first.
"I can have a car take you home when you're done," she said. "You shouldn't drive."
She was kind, and I was grateful, and I hated that I was.
Gilbert touched my sleeve.
"He's making a terrible mistake, Claire," he said. "But it's his to make. Let's get you out of this room."
My hand was shaking so badly that my first initial came out as a scribble.
Quentin watched it.
His jaw moved once and then went still.
So I signed.
I signed on every flag the lawyer pointed to, and I did not read a word.
When the last page was done, the lawyer capped his pen and Quentin slid the check one inch closer to my hand.
"Take it," Quentin said. "You'll need it."
I picked it up.
Five million dollars, with his signature in the corner.
I stood, and my chair scraped back against the carpet.
Nobody said goodbye.
I walked the length of that long room with the check in my hand and every eye on my back.
Halfway to the door, I stopped.
I thought of my father Frank's face when they boxed up his desk.
I thought of the man who had just taken that bank and called it an inconvenience.
I turned around.
I tore the check in half.
Then I tore it in half again, and again, until the pieces were smaller than a coin.
I let them fall onto the floor of Quentin Holloway's boardroom.
"Keep it," I said. "You can't buy back six years."
Quentin had gone white.
One of his executives coughed.
Gretchen took one step forward and said, "Claire, please, that was a lot of money," in the tone of someone who really did not want me to be foolish.
"Let her go, Gretchen," Gilbert said gently. He was already on his feet, holding the door open for me.
"Go home, dear," he said. "Rest. You look exhausted."
I walked out past him without answering.
Quentin did not call my name.
The elevator doors closed, and he still had not.
I leaned my forehead against the cold mirrored wall.
My bag had been heavy all week because I had shoved the clinic's envelope in it on Tuesday and never opened it.
I had gone in about the dizziness.
I had blamed my nerves, and then the stress of Quentin working late every night for a month.
I tore the envelope open with my teeth.
The sheet inside was one page long.
Under my name, in a box, the lab had printed the result.
Positive.
Beneath it, in smaller type, was the estimate that made my knees go.
Twelve weeks.
The baby had been growing the entire time he was rehearsing that speech.
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