My Husband Used My Fortune to Support His Mistress novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Brooch

In the lobby Hannah takes her mother's brooch back from Camille in front of the guests, and Camille announces she is pregnant.

Eli did not answer him.

He set the leather folder in front of the empty chair and said to the bank officers, "Please wait by the elevator."

Then he looked at me, and for one second I saw something in his face that I did not know how to read.

"Ask me later," he said quietly. "Not in front of them."

"Ask him what?" Joan said. Her voice had gone thin. "Hannah, honey, what is he talking about?"

"I would like to know that too," I said.

Bryce straightened his cuffs.

"Fine. Keep your secrets. But you're making a mistake, and everyone in this room is going to watch you make it."

He turned to the investors.

"Gentlemen, I'm sorry for the scene."

Neither of them looked at him.

One was already standing, his napkin dropped on his plate.

"I'll have my office call yours," he said to me. Not to Bryce.

The accountant followed him out without a word.

That left the four of us and the waiter.

"Bryce," Camille said. "Do something."

"I'm doing something."

"Your card was declined in front of the investors."

"I know what happened to my card."

I stood up and took my napkin off my lap.

"The elevator is that way. Joan, Eli will have someone take you home."

"I'm not leaving my son."

"Then you can both go down together."

Bryce looked at me for a long moment.

"You'll regret this," he said. He said it without heat.

He took his mother's arm and walked to the elevator.

Camille followed, her heels loud on the marble.

I followed too, because the dinner was over and the hotel was mine and I wanted to see them leave it.

The lobby was lit and busy.

A wedding party was crossing to the ballroom in a loose bright crowd, and two women in gowns were taking pictures by the fountain.

The brass clock over the front desk said eight-twenty-six.

Bryce walked straight through the crowd with his head up.

Camille did not.

She slowed beside the fountain and fumbled at her phone, and the lamp over the desk caught the pearls on her shoulder.

"Camille," I said.

She turned.

"That brooch belonged to my mother."

"Bryce gave it to me," she said, and touched it. "He said it was a family piece."

"It is. It's mine."

"Darling." She laughed, softly, for the nearest guests. "Let's not do this here."

"We can do it here or at the police station. Which would you like?"

The two women with the cameras had stopped taking pictures.

Camille's face changed.

"It's a gift," she said, louder. "I didn't steal anything. He put it in my hand."

"He put my mother's brooch in your hand on a night you were sitting at my table."

I held out my palm.

"Take it off."

"Hannah, don't," Bryce said, coming back toward us. "This is humiliating for everyone."

"Yes," I said. "It is."

Camille unpinned it.

Her fingers shook, and she dropped it, and it rang against the marble.

A busboy bent to pick it up.

I took it from him and closed my hand around it.

The clasp had been bent.

My mother wore it on the day she took me to my first piano recital, and I remembered the weight of it on her dress.

I put it in my pocket.

"Thank you," I said to the busboy.

The wedding party had gone quiet.

A security guard I had known for ten years stepped up beside me, not touching anyone, just standing there.

"Mrs. Danner," he said.

"Prescott," I said. "It's always been Prescott."

I turned to Bryce.

"You may stay at the Grand tonight. Room 410, on the house. After tonight it's all on you."

"You can't throw me out of my own home."

"It was never your home."

"It's my wife's house."

"It's my father's house. And it's mine."

Joan covered her mouth with her fingers.

Bryce's eyes moved over the lobby, across the cameras, the guests, the guard.

He saw them all, and I watched him decide to make it worse.

"You're humiliating a pregnant woman in the middle of a hotel," he said.

The silence changed.

I looked at Camille.

She had her hand flat against her stomach, and her chin up, and her eyes on me.

"Eleven weeks," she said. "Tell her, Bryce."

He didn't.

He just looked at me, steady and sorry, and let the whole lobby look at me too.

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