My Billionaire Boss Won't Let Me Quit novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Drawer

"Who he's been looking for," I repeated.

Clara smiled at me with her lipstick gone.

"Ask him."

"Leave," Lucas said.

His voice was very quiet.

"You don't have to be so cold," she said.

"I know about the stairwell, Lucas.

"I've known for two years."

"Security," he said, into his phone.

She backed toward the elevator with her hands raised and a look that said I'd regret not asking.

The doors closed on her.

I stood in the hall with my key card in one hand and my heart doing a bad thing.

"What stairwell?" I asked.

"Not yet."

"Who is she talking about?"

"A girl I knew when I was a kid."

It was the first real thing he had given me, and it came out like a stone.

"You have my word that I'll tell you the rest, Magda.

"I just can't do it today."

"Okay," I said.

I said it flatly, because I couldn't say anything else, and I went inside.

He took a call in the kitchen about a hotel in Denver.

I stood in the living room for a moment.

Then I walked into his study and opened the drawer with the lemon drops.

I am not proud of it.

But I had spent six years reading rooms for what had been removed from them, and the drawer was too neat.

Under the jar was a folder.

Inside the folder were classified ads, cut from newspapers, and clipped to each one was an invoice from the investigator.

Chicago Tribune.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The Wisconsin State Journal.

Thirty-one papers in all.

The ads were the same every time, four lines long.

Looking for a girl who called herself Clara.

A summer, a long time ago.

She was kind to me.

Please call.

Under the ads was a list of names in Lucas's handwriting, a column of Claras with the surname beside each one.

Thirty-six of them had a line through them.

At the bottom, one was circled.

CLARA KRUSZEWSKI?

The question mark was in pencil, and he had gone over it three times.

I stood there with the paper cold in my hands.

Eight years of ads.

A man who couldn't stop looking for a woman named Clara had married me a week after I kissed him.

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