We Never Said We Went Bankrupt! novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ring Tray
Ainsley is dumped on a stage before the whole Greenwich gala over a rumor. She hands back the ring, then a stranger pays her valet bill.
The Delacourts' ballroom smelled like lilies and money.
I was the only one in it who could feel the air change when I walked in.
Conversations stopped one table at a time.
A woman I had known since kindergarten turned her whole body toward the wall.
I kept walking, because my fiancé was on the stage, and his mother was holding the microphone.
Nineteen days earlier, someone had posted that Lockridge Holdings had defaulted on a loan of four hundred million dollars.
Nobody had ever shown a paper.
Nobody had ever called my father to ask.
By the end of that week, everyone I knew had simply decided it was true.
My father had said one thing about it, at our kitchen table, with his reading glasses pushed up into his gray hair.
"We never said we went bankrupt, Ainsley. Nobody asked us. They just heard it."
I had believed that would be enough.
It was not.
"Ainsley, darling," Regina Delacourt said into the microphone, and her voice filled the room.
"Come up here. I want to do this properly."
I climbed the three steps in my green silk dress with two hundred people watching.
Preston stood beside her, blond and handsome, looking at his shoes.
We had been engaged for fourteen months.
His mother had picked the date, the church and the flowers.
"This family has always valued honesty," Regina said.
"So I will be honest with all of you tonight."
She turned and smiled at me, and her pearls shone under the lights.
"My son cannot marry into a household that is drowning in debt."
A small, pleased sound went through the room.
I looked at Preston.
"Say it yourself," I told him.
He swallowed.
"Mother is right," he said to the floor. "I can't, Ains. It's the family. You understand."
Fourteen months, and he could not even say it to my face.
Something in my chest went quiet and very clear.
I did not cry.
I took the ring off my finger, slowly, so that the people in the back could see.
There was a silver tray on the stage with champagne flutes on it, and I set the ring in the middle of the tray.
It made a tiny click.
Then I took the microphone out of Regina's hand.
She was so surprised that she let me.
"Good evening," I said.
My voice came out steady, and I was a little proud of that.
"My name is Ainsley Lockridge, and for the last nineteen days, every one of you has told everyone else that my family is bankrupt."
Nobody moved.
"My father has never said it."
"My brother has never said it."
"I have never said it."
"We never said it, because it isn't true."
"Somebody started this, and every one of you decided it was easier to believe than to pick up a phone."
A man near the front laughed at me.
I looked right at him.
"You had lunch at my father's table every Sunday for nine years, sir."
His smile slid off.
"Come to Lockridge Holdings on Monday morning and ask for the books," I said.
"All of you."
"Bring your lawyers."
"I will have coffee ready."
Regina reached for the microphone, and I put it back into her hand myself.
"You've been very generous tonight, Mrs. Delacourt," I told her.
"You've done my family a favor."
"Now everyone here knows exactly who they are."
I stepped off the stage.
Nobody clapped.
Nobody stopped me either, and the crowd opened in front of me.
I held my head up all the way across the ballroom.
I held it up through the lobby, and past the coat check, and out under the long white awning to the valet stand.
Only there, in the cold, did my hands start to shake.
The valet took my ticket and looked at it for a long moment.
"I'm sorry, Miss Lockridge," he said, not meeting my eyes. "There's a hold on the car account. They said the Lockridge cards are declined."
"That's impossible," I said. "That card was fine this morning."
"The Delacourts' office called ahead," he said, very softly. "Before you got here."
I stood there on the wet pavement in my silk dress, with my family's name in ruins behind me and my purse in my hand.
Someone stepped up on my right, close enough that I smelled rain on a dark wool coat.
"Put it on mine," a man said to the valet.
His voice was low and dry and completely calm.
I turned.
I had never seen him before in my life.
He was tall and lean, with dark hair and gray eyes, and a thin white scar through his left eyebrow.
He was looking at the ballroom doors, not at me.
"Lawrence Kerrigan," he said. "Get in the car, Miss Lockridge."
"Somebody in there just made a very expensive mistake," Lawrence said, "and I'd like to know which of us gets to watch."
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