Chapter 20: His Vote

I unfolded the page in the coat room, under a bulb, with Jocelyn's wet raincoat dripping on the tile beside me.

It was a single sheet torn from a ledger, in Darrell's neat salesman's hand.

Dates down the left, amounts down the right, and a column of initials between them.

Cash.

Seven withdrawals, none of them under half a million.

At the bottom he had added it up and drawn a box around the figure.

Six million, one hundred thousand dollars.

The last line said, V.G., cellar, 11/2.

"Why bring it to me?" I said.

Jocelyn stood with her arms wrapped around herself.

"Because I stood there tonight," she said, "and every hand in that room went up, and I thought, nobody ever did that for me."

"That isn't a reason."

"It's the only one I've got."

She went out the way she had come.

I did not call after her, and I did not offer her the car.

Winslow said nothing all the way home.

He drove with both hands on the wheel and his black tie still knotted.

The lake went by on our right.

In the front hall, under my grandmother's portrait, he took a folded paper from his jacket and held it out.

"Read it."

I read it.

It was one paragraph on Sorrell Fiduciary letterhead, signed Winslow Strathmore, resigning as co-trustee effective Monday at nine.

I looked up.

"No."

"Rhiannon."

"No."

"You heard the room tonight," he said.

"A woman at table six said it to her husband when I held your chair. 'Of course she keeps the trustee close.'"

"So?"

"Tomorrow it will be in the paper."

"Let it be in the paper."

"They'll say you bought me."

"They'll say what they like."

"I'm not going to be the proof for them."

His voice stayed level, and that was how I knew what it cost him.

"I hold a vote so I can say no to you. In your bed, on your family's salary, that vote is a joke."

Keep reading free with an account. Start After Divorce, My Ex-Wife Became a Billionaire from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.