When I Flash Married a Billionaire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Room 614
Briony finds a lipstick and a hotel key in her fiance's jacket at the rehearsal dinner, films him with her half-sister through a half-open door, and at 3 a.m. calls the number of a man she once pulled off subway tracks; he answers on the first ring.
The lipstick was in the inside pocket of Dexter's jacket, and I found it because he asked me to hold his coat.
It was the night before my wedding, and we were at our rehearsal dinner.
Forty people sat in the back room of a steakhouse on Public Square, and my fiance was about to give a toast.
"Hold this, babe," Dexter said, and shrugged off his navy jacket into my arms.
He kissed my forehead, and I smelled his cologne.
Then I smelled something else under it, sweet and cheap.
I slid my hand into the pocket to find his speech.
There was no speech.
There was a gold tube of lipstick and a white paper sleeve from the Marlow Hotel.
Inside the sleeve was a key card, and on the sleeve someone had written "614" in pen.
I knew the handwriting, because I had grown up fighting it for the last drawer in our bathroom.
It belonged to my half-sister.
Ottilie's chair was empty across the table.
She was my maid of honor, and she had gone to take a call twenty minutes ago.
I looked at Dexter, standing at the head of the room with his glass up, his teeth white and his hand steady.
"To Briony," he said. "The best thing that ever happened to me."
Everybody clapped.
My father cried a little, which he did at dinners when the wine was good.
I smiled, put the jacket over my arm, and said I needed the restroom.
Nobody looked twice.
The Marlow was four minutes away if you walked fast across the Square.
I walked fast.
The elevator smelled like carpet cleaner, and I rode it alone to the sixth floor with the key card in my fist.
I did not use it.
Room 614 had a door that didn't latch right, the kind you had to shoulder shut.
It was open an inch.
I heard the TV first, a game show laughing at itself.
Then I heard Ottilie giggle, the high baby giggle she used on waiters and landlords and men.
I took out my phone and pressed record.
I did not decide to.
My thumb simply knew what to do.
I put my eye to the gap.
Dexter's tie was on the floor.
Ottilie was on the bed in the pink bridesmaid dress she had modeled for me last Sunday.
His hands were in her hair.
"Say it again," Dexter said.
"She'll walk down the aisle in her dead mother's veil," Ottilie said, laughing, "and I'll have had you first."
"Tomorrow I marry her portfolio, babe."
His mouth was at her throat.
"That gull-wing roof gets me a partnership by spring. You get me for the weekends."
"I get you for the weekends and you get her for the money," she said. "Daddy's going to love this."
I filmed a forty-second video.
I checked the timestamp afterward on the screen, because I'm a person who measures things.
Then I stopped recording, saved it twice, and sent it to my own email and to Jorie's.
I did not kick the door.
I did not scream or throw the key card at his head.
I thought about it until the elevator doors opened.
Then I put the thought down.
If I screamed, they would say I was hysterical.
If I cancelled, they'd say Briony Falk got dumped and tried to hide it.
I had already been the girl whose mother died and whose father picked the other daughter.
I was not going to be that girl in a church parking lot as well.
I walked back to the steakhouse and handed Dexter his jacket.
"Where were you?" he said.
"Looking for the bathroom," I said. "Your pocket was heavy. I put the lipstick on the dessert cart."
His smile held for one second too long.
Ottilie came back in a minute later, flushed and pink, and kissed me on the cheek.
"Big day tomorrow, sis," she said.
"Huge," I said.
At 2 a.m. Dexter was asleep with his arm across the bed.
I sat on the bathroom floor with my seating chart and a pencil, and I crossed out his name.
I wrote a new plan on the back in small neat capitals, the way I draw.
At the bottom was one line with a question mark.
HUSBAND?
I opened my wallet looking for nothing, and a crumpled receipt fell out.
It was three weeks old, from a coffee cart near the West 25th Street station.
On the back, in a stranger's shaky handwriting, was a phone number, four words and a first name.
"I owe you. Anything. Ewan."
I looked at the pale scar on my left forearm, where the rail had caught me.
That was the night I dragged a man off the tracks.
I had never called.
It was 3:12 in the morning.
I dialed before I could think better of it.
It did not ring twice.
"Briony," said a low voice, wide awake, like he'd been sitting by the phone. "It took you three weeks."
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