My Holiday Bonus Was a $5 Million IOU! I Quit and Their Company Collapsed novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Mother's Offer

I wrote back from the counter, with my jeans still on the floor.

"Nine tomorrow morning. Alone."

My mother answered at once: "Bring a pen."

Ansel drove me there and parked at the curb in front of the house I grew up in.

"I'll be right here," he said.

"You'll be in the car."

"I'll be in the car, right here."

I walked up the path under the porch light I had changed the bulb in a hundred times.

The kitchen smelled of lemon and coffee.

My mother sat at the island in a cream cardigan with a cup of tea in front of her, and on the granite lay one sheet of paper and a black pen.

Nobody else was home.

"Sit," she said. "Please."

I stayed standing.

"Brynn has a checkup at ten," she said. "I thought we should talk before she's back."

"Before she's back, you mean."

"Mara." She turned the page toward me. "Read it."

It was the Acknowledgment of Debt, and across the bottom she had written VOID in her neat hand and dated it yesterday.

"I'll withdraw the suit this afternoon," she said. "I was wrong to put that number on you. I was frightened of the bank and I took it out on the one person who would take it."

It was the first time I had ever heard her say wrong.

I waited for the rest of it.

"I'd like you to come back to the company," she said. "Not as an employee. As a partner. Sunday Table under a management agreement, three years, with a real share. You'd have your own office on the ninth floor."

"There's no ninth floor, Mom. Hattie walked out with twenty-three people."

"Then we rebuild it," she said. "Together."

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