His Test Cost Him a Wife, Not a Negotiation novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Last Offer

I took her to the empty seminar room across the hall, because I did not want her in front of the chair's door.

Rosalind sat at the long table with her coat still on.

Without the pearls and the dress, she looked like what she was, a tired woman of thirty-eight from Wheeling.

I stayed standing.

"You have three minutes," I said. "I have a class."

"Eleanor has cut me off." Her voice cracked on it. "The house in Back Bay, the account, my husband's trust. Her lawyers sent a letter on Sunday. I was out of the building by Monday night."

"You took her money for fifteen years."

"I took it for what I did for her."

"You narrated girls like me to a room."

"Yes." She didn't argue. "I did that."

I had expected a fight, and it was strange to find none.

She put both hands flat on the table.

"I need you to say that Eleanor made me do it," she said. "On the video, in a statement, anything. That she held the check over my head and I had no choice. The board will listen to you now."

"And that would help you."

"It would let me keep what's left. My name in Wheeling. My mother's church."

I looked at her for a long moment.

She was not pretending, and I could tell.

"Did she make you?" I asked.

"She..." Rosalind stopped.

"Did she make you stand up at my dinner and call it a family tradition? Did she make you follow me into that lobby?"

She said nothing.

"Did she make you go to my father's porch?"

"I thought," Rosalind said slowly, "that if I was the one who closed the door on you, no one would ask about mine."

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