He Texted Me Divorce, So I Took 20 Million and Vanished novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The House on the Point

Louisa tells Libby about the four babies and buys the shingled house her grandmother used to clean, and then Leo's engagement to Blythe Carrow is announced.

"Insane how?" I asked.

Libby opened the passenger door for me, which she had never done in her life.

"Like a guy who hasn't slept. He asked me three times. He gave me his cell number and said to call any hour." She climbed in her side. "Then he said please. Rich guys don't say please, Lulu."

"This one doesn't."

"Well, this one did."

She started the truck and blasted the heat.

We drove out past the oil tanks and over the bridge toward Cape Elizabeth.

I watched the dark water go by.

"Okay," Libby said. "Car's moving. Talk."

"He texted me yesterday. Twenty million dollars for a divorce."

She hit the brakes so hard the seat belt grabbed me.

A car behind us honked and swerved around.

"Twenty million dollars?"

"I said yes."

"Obviously you said yes!" She started driving again. "Who wouldn't say yes? I'd divorce my own mother for twenty million dollars."

"There's more."

"More than twenty million?"

I took a breath.

"I'm pregnant."

The truck drifted toward the yellow line.

She fixed it.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Okay. Is it his?"

"Libby."

"I have to ask! You said you barely saw him."

"Once," I said. "The night of my mom's funeral."

She was quiet for a second.

Then she reached across and squeezed my hand without looking at me.

"Does he know?"

"No. And there's more."

"Louisa Lambert, if you say there's a second guy..."

"It's four."

"Four what?"

"Babies. It's quadruplets."

Libby pulled onto the shoulder and put the truck in park.

She turned on the dome light and looked at me.

Then she put her face down on the steering wheel and started laughing so hard she couldn't breathe.

"Four," she wheezed. "You went to bed with a billionaire one time and got four."

"He's not a billionaire. I don't think."

"Lulu. He paid twenty million to get rid of you. He's a billionaire."

I started laughing too.

I laughed until I was crying, and then I was just crying, with my forehead on the cold window.

Libby rubbed my back and didn't say anything until I stopped.

"You're staying with me," she said. "Mom's going to lose her mind. She loves a crisis."

I stayed with the Hutchinses while I looked for a place.

Libby's mom fed me chowder twice a day and didn't ask about the ring line on my finger.

Her dad, a retired lobsterman, taught me to pick a crab clean at the kitchen table.

Every morning I drove Libby's truck out to the point.

There was a house out there I'd known since I was six.

Gray shingles, white trim, a wide porch looking straight out at the water.

My grandmother used to clean it for a family from Connecticut who came up for August.

She'd bring me along and let me sit on the back steps while she worked.

I used to pretend it was mine.

The Connecticut family had sold it years ago, and now the sign out front said it was for sale again.

$2.1 million.

It had five bedrooms.

I'd counted the windows from the road a hundred times.

I called a lawyer in Portland, the boring kind with a plaque by the door.

I asked him to buy the house through a trust, so my name wouldn't show up anywhere.

"May I ask why?" he said.

"My ex-husband's family has a lot of lawyers."

He nodded.

Maybe it did.

The closing took nineteen days.

On the first Friday in March, the lawyer slid a ring of old brass keys across his desk.

I drove out to the point with Libby and opened the front door.

It smelled like dust and cold and the sea.

The floors creaked exactly where they used to.

Libby walked from room to room, flicking light switches on and off.

"It's huge," she said. "You could fit a soccer team in here."

"I'm going to."

She laughed and threw a dust cloth at me.

We didn't have furniture.

We dragged a mattress from her parents' guest room up the porch steps and dropped it in front of the fireplace.

Libby drove to the clam shack on Route 77 and came back with two boxes of fried clams and a bag of fries.

We ate them on the mattress with the fire going and our coats still on.

The windows were black, and the lighthouse beam swept past every few seconds.

"Your grandma would be so smug right now," Libby said.

"She'd make me take my shoes off."

"She'd make you wax the floors."

I pulled my knees up and leaned against the wall.

For the first time since the ultrasound, my chest didn't feel tight.

The babies were the size of strawberries.

I'd looked it up.

Four strawberries, safe in a house on the edge of the ocean.

"What are you going to tell them?" Libby asked. "About him?"

"I don't know yet."

"You could tell them he's dead."

"Libby."

"A tragic yacht accident. Very glamorous."

I threw a fry at her.

She caught it and ate it, and then she picked up her phone to check the time and went still.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, no."

"What?"

She hesitated.

Then she turned the screen around.

It was a society column from a New York paper, posted that afternoon.

There was a photo of Teresa Fontana in pearls, smiling with her arm around Blythe Carrow.

The headline said the Fontana family was "delighted to share" that Leo Fontana and Miss Carrow would marry in the fall.

The divorce papers I'd signed were three weeks old.

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