You've Been Replaced, First Love novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Twenty Thousand

I recorded my answer on Saturday morning, sitting on the loft's windowsill with my knees up.

"Kendrick. Pay me six thousand four hundred and pay Maddox eleven thousand two hundred, and I'll talk about your window."

"Until then, the glass stays bare."

I sent it and put the phone face down.

Downstairs, a plane was shushing back and forth across a board, a slow rhythm.

I came down the stairs at seven with my hair in a clip and a sleeve of his flannel pulled over my hand.

Maddox looked up from a long piece of cherry and nodded at the kettle.

"The opening got pushed," he said. "A cook there texted me. They moved it a week."

"Because of me."

"Because the Sentinel ran a photo of the window this morning." He turned his phone around. "'The Annora Room: Gold Where the Name Used To Be.' It's got eleven hundred likes."

I read it and felt a small, mean, wonderful warmth.

Then someone knocked on the street door.

It was the polite knock again.

Maddox set down the plane.

"I can get rid of him."

"No," I said. "I'll do it."

I opened the door.

Kendrick stood on the step in a navy coat with a long envelope in his hand, and he did not look rested now.

His eyes were red at the rims, and he had missed a place shaving.

"Ellory, please," he said. "Five minutes."

"You've got one."

"The Sentinel is going to bury me." He held out the envelope. "Twenty thousand, cash, as I said. I'm not a monster, Ellory. I just need you to finish it."

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