Chapter 13: Two Hundred Thousand

The club manager put the three of us in her office and shut the door.

Roz had refused to stay outside, and nobody had the energy to make her.

Mr. Pennell sat down behind the manager's desk, and she stood by the wall.

He laid the envelope with the county seal in front of me.

"Read it," he said.

It was a copy of the Nevada certificate, the same record Roz had found for me, printed and left under my register.

Groom: Travis James Odell. Bride: Jenna Marie Corliss.

"I've read it," I said.

"Of course you have." He folded his hands. "You've been holding it for a week and smiling at my daughter."

"I took her deposit and I did her flowers."

"You waited."

"I did."

He studied me for a while.

I think he had expected me to lie, or cry, and was working out what to do with a woman who did neither.

"Let's be adults," he said. "That marriage was a drunken mistake, and it's three years dead."

"It's on the record in Clark County."

"Records are corrected every day. A signature, a petition, six weeks, and nobody will ever know it existed."

"Including your guests."

"Including them."

He slid a second paper across the desk.

It was a check, already written, on his personal account.

Two hundred thousand dollars.

Roz made a small choked sound beside me.

"Sign the dissolution tonight," Mr. Pennell said. "Walk away from Odell. The club hires you for every event for five years."

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