Ten thousand dollars.
Enough for months of treatment. Enough to make gratitude feel complicated.
An hour later, in the locker room, the adrenaline finally drained from her body and left her trembling. Victory, she discovered, was not a bright thing. It was heavy. It came wrapped in consequences.
She changed out of her wet uniform slowly. The check sat on the bench beside her canvas bag like a dare. She kept hearing Cynthia’s voice, hearing her own, hearing the crack in the room when everything broke. She had humiliated a billionaire’s wife and publicly exposed a divorce clause. No matter how justified, that was not the kind of thing one simply did and then returned to normal life.
A knock sounded at the door.
Claude stood there, pale.
“There is a car waiting for you outside,” he said.
“I take the subway.”
“It is not a subway sort of car,” Claude whispered. “It is a Bentley. The driver asked for the scholar.”
Casey closed her eyes briefly.
Of course.
Outside, in the alley behind the restaurant where the dumpsters smelled of rain and stale shellfish, a sleek black Bentley idled beneath a streetlamp. The rear window rolled down.
Preston Ashford sat inside, tie loosened, tablet in hand.
“Get in, Ms. Miller.”
“I’m going home, Mr. Ashford.”
“Columbia first thing in the morning,” he said, glancing at the tablet. “Doctoral candidate. Dissertation on linguistic ambiguity in postwar treaties. Undergraduate degree from Georgetown on scholarship. Fluent in French, German, and Italian. Mother in Ohio receiving dialysis treatment not adequately covered by insurance.”
Casey’s spine stiffened. “You investigated me?”
“I dislike mysteries,” he said. “And you are one.”
She should have walked away. Every sensible instinct told her that men like Preston Ashford did not enter the lives of women like her unless they intended to rearrange them for their own convenience.
Then she thought of her mother’s tired face beneath fluorescent hospital light.
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