The Gold Digger's Ledger novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Price of Silence

Tristan's POV

The first night I saw Miranda Dunleavy, I was trying to decide which watch to sell.

It was a Thursday in March.

I sat at the end of her bar with a whiskey I couldn't afford and my father's watch on my wrist.

She set down a coaster and looked at my sleeve.

"You look like a man about to sell something," she said.

I laughed for the first time in a month.

I asked her what she was writing in the little book by the register.

"Tips," she said.

She lied badly and without shame, and I liked her for it.

I came back every night for a week.

On the eighth night, I took her to dinner at Alder and Rye.

In the morning I sold my gold cufflinks.

That was the first one.

I told myself it was a one-time thing. A man should be able to take a woman out once.

Then I took her out again.

I knew about the book by April.

She left it open once, in the kitchen of her tiny apartment, while she made me coffee.

I read the top of the page upside down.

I saw the line at the bottom.

Leave when it's reached.

I said nothing. I went home and sold the next thing.

I know what that sounds like.

It sounds like the stupidest thing a person can do, selling his own family's things to buy dinner for a woman who plans to leave him.

But she never asked me for anything.

Everyone else in my life had asked, my whole life, for my name, my table, my signature.

She looked at the bill, and at me, and she never pretended it cost nothing.

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