I Married My Fiancé's Uncle novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: No More Silences

"I'm going," I said.

Bex gave a relieved smile.

"To him," I said. "Not away from him."

"I know which one you meant." She got up and handed me my jacket. "I'm calling you a cab. It's his one term, and I'm enforcing it out of spite."

The cab smelled like pine air freshener.

It dropped me on State Street at nine.

The windows were lit all along the block, twelve gold boxes in the snow, and a line of families still stood in front of Seven.

I stood with them for one minute.

The lead reindeer turned its head toward a boy in a Bears hat.

Then I went around to the alley and keyed in at the dock.

The doorman was dozing at his desk in the lobby. He woke when the elevator dinged.

"Evening, Mrs. Bancroft."

Nobody had ever called me that.

"Evening," I said, and my voice did something stupid.

The twelfth floor was dark except for the library.

Felix sat in the old man's leather chair with his reading glasses on and a stack of papers he wasn't reading.

He looked up when I came in.

He didn't stand. I think he didn't trust himself to.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi."

I held up the envelope with the deed in it.

"You gave away half of a parcel my family has owned since 1899. On a Saturday. In a tea room."

"It was the right tea room."

"Bex filmed it from behind a pillar."

"I know. She waved."

I put the envelope on the old man's desk.

"I'm not here because of this," I said.

"Okay."

"I'm here because I want to be. But there's a rule."

He took off his glasses and folded them.

"Tell me."

"No more silences. Not the big ones and not the little ones. If you know something about my life, I know it the same day. If it's ugly, I still know it."

"Yes."

"Both ways," I said. "So here's mine."

I took out my phone and set it on the desk between us.

"Laurence came to Bex's last night. I went out on the porch. I recorded him."

I pressed play.

Felix listened to the whole recording without moving.

When it reached the word divorce, he put one hand flat on the desk.

When it ended, his face had gone very white around the mouth.

"Three years," he said. "He's been hiding losses from me for three years."

"Yes."

"I can have him out of the building tonight."

"And tomorrow he's on every channel, the nephew whose uncle stole his bride and then fired him. And this is a jealous wife's phone recording." I picked the phone up. "When he goes, I want all of it. Who smashed my reindeer. Who paid the man in the watch cap. All of it, in front of everyone."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Your call," he said.

"Your turn."

He knew what I meant.

He set his glasses on the desk very carefully, square to the edge.

"Clause nine," he said. "I wrote it."

The grandfather clock ticked.

"Priscilla's lawyers drafted 'to Odessa Faulkner and Laurence Bancroft.' I crossed out his name and wrote 'her Bancroft husband.' Nobody noticed. Nobody reads clause nine."

"Why?"

"So it didn't have to be him." He didn't look away. "I didn't think it would ever be me. I wrote it anyway."

I stood there with my coat on, dripping snow on the old man's rug.

"That's the most romantic thing anybody's ever done to a real estate document," I said.

His mouth twitched.

"Is there anything else?"

"I ate the pie."

"What?"

"Priscilla's pie. The one I wanted to throw off the terrace. I ate it while you were at Bex's. All of it. Standing up, in the kitchen."

I laughed so hard I had to hold on to the desk.

It was the first real laugh since the tea room, and it went on too long and turned wet at the end.

He got up then.

He came around the desk and stopped one step away, the way he'd stopped in the doorway yesterday.

"Can I?" he said.

I took the last step myself.

He held my face in both hands and kissed me like it was the courthouse again, slow and sure, except there was no clerk and no camera, and nobody to prove anything to.

I pushed my coat off my shoulders onto the floor.

He kissed my jaw, my cheek, the corner of my eye.

"I missed you," he said against my hair. "It was one day."

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