My Husband's Brother Owns My Secret novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: What's Mine

I read the email three times.

Then I put the phone face down on the books and lay back.

Two point four million dollars.

For six weeks of me asleep.

Hutch woke up because I was too still.

"What?"

I handed him the phone.

He read it with one eye open and his face in the pillow.

Then he sat up.

"Huh," he said.

"That's all? Huh?"

"It's a lot of huh."

He gave me back the phone.

"It's yours," he said. "Whatever you do with her. I'm not voting."

"She's not even mine yet. Half of her is still Graydon's until the divorce."

"Then get the other half."

I looked at the pale rectangle on the wall.

"I don't want to sell her," I said.

"Okay."

"Is that stupid? It's two point four million dollars, Hutch. Fran could quit the salon. You could pay off the alley."

"I don't want to pay off the alley. I like owing a little. It keeps me humble."

"You're not humble."

"Then it keeps me trying."

I laughed and threw the phone at the blanket.

"I don't want her in a vault," I said. "Or a living room in Lake Forest. I want her somewhere people walk past her on a Tuesday. With my name next to her."

"Then that's what you want."

I called my lawyer on the twenty-eighth.

She was in her office on LaSalle Street between Christmas and New Year's because she always was.

"I want to make Graydon an offer," I said.

"He's not in a position to bargain. He's been removed from his own bank. Half the city watched him yell at a gallery owner."

"Good. Then he'll take it."

I told her.

She was quiet on the line for a long time.

"You'd waive the three million," she said. "In exchange for his claim on one painting."

"Yes."

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