My Fiancé Took Her on Vacation Instead of Marrying Me? I Married WAY Better novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Kylie's Box

Henry came down the stairs in a T-shirt and sweatpants, with his glasses on.

He looked through the glass at her, then at me.

"Your call," he said.

I took my phone out of my robe pocket, opened the voice recorder and pressed the red button.

I put the phone back in my pocket with the screen against my hip.

Then I opened the door.

"You can stand in the hall," I said. "You can't come any further."

Kylie stepped in and stamped her boots.

She set the box down on the hall bench.

"He's going to put it all on me," she said. "I figured it out at the brunch. The way he looked at me. Like he was measuring me for something."

"For what?"

"For the blame." She pulled the lid off the box. "So I'm going first."

The box was full of bank statements, folded soft.

Wire confirmations.

A spiral notebook with numbers in Bryce's square handwriting.

"I printed it from his laptop while he was at the gym," she said. "Every transfer since October. Every client deposit he moved out to cover rent and payroll and his car."

"How much?"

"More than four hundred thousand."

"Why bring it here?" I said. "There's a detective who'd love to see it."

Kylie laughed, a short flat sound.

"So I can go to jail too? No thanks. You're rich. Your husband's rich. Your grandpa's, like, insanely rich."

She put her hand flat on the papers.

"Two hundred thousand dollars," she said. "Wired to me by Monday. And you get the box, and I disappear, and you can bury him with it."

"And if I say no?"

"Then this goes in a fireplace, and you never prove anything." She smiled at me. "And I tell everybody you tried to buy me off."

I looked at the box.

"Did you know?" I said. "When you were answering the phones? When the honeymoon couple called you from the airport crying?"

"I did my job."

"You told them to stop being dramatic."

"They were being dramatic."

"Did you take any of it yourself?"

Her eyes moved, very fast, to the door and back.

"Refunds," Henry said quietly from the stairs. "You handled the refunds."

Kylie's face went blank.

"That's different," she said. "That was like eighteen thousand. That's nothing. That's a rounding error to you people."

I took a breath.

"No," I said.

"No, what?"

"No deal. I don't pay for stolen things."

She stared at me.

"You're going to let him get away with it? Over two hundred thousand dollars? You probably spend that on shoes."

"I wear the same boots every day," I said. "You've seen them."

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