The Billionaire's Fifty-Dollar Mistress

They let me keep the stapler.

Of all things, that was what I kept thinking about on the drive home. Two hundred analysts worked on the fourth floor of Brennan & Cole, and at nine-fifteen this morning a woman from Ashcroft Holdings stood at the front of the room in a grey suit and told half of us that our positions had been “absorbed.” She said it the way you’d announce a change to the cafeteria menu. Then a security guard named Phil, who I’d bought birthday cake for last spring, stood over my desk while I packed four years into a cardboard box. When I reached for the stapler, he shrugged and said, “Take it. Nobody’s gonna miss it.”

Nobody was going to miss me either, apparently.

I handed him my badge on its lanyard before I remembered that my apartment key was clipped to the same ring. By then he’d already dropped it into a plastic tub with everyone else’s, and the look he gave me when I asked for it back told me exactly how much patience he had left for sad women with boxes.

So I’d have to hope Jordan was home.

He usually was. Jordan worked from our living room, trading crypto on two monitors I’d bought him for his birthday, and most days he didn’t get dressed until noon. I pictured him opening the door in sweatpants, seeing my face, and pulling me into his arms without a word. Three years together, and last Saturday he’d finally gotten down on one knee at Lake Merrow with a ring I’d quietly helped pay for.

My husband, I’d thought this morning in the elevator, and then I’d caught myself. Fiancé. I wasn’t supposed to call him that yet. The word had felt so good in my head that I’d smiled anyway.

The first thing I noticed when I pulled onto Harlow Street was the car.

A black Maybach sat in front of my building, parked across two spaces and polished so hard it reflected the laundromat sign next door. Nobody on Harlow Street drove a Maybach. Nobody on Harlow Street drove anything worth more than a year of their rent. I squeezed my Corolla in behind it and sat there for a moment with the engine ticking.

One of Jordan’s crypto friends, probably. One of them had finally made it, and he’d come over to show off.

I carried my box up three flights because the elevator had been broken since August, and by the time I reached our door my calves were burning and my blouse was stuck to my back. I paid the rent on this place. Every cent of it, every month, for two years. Jordan had promised to start chipping in once his portfolio stabilized, and somewhere along the way I’d stopped asking when that would be.

I lifted my hand to knock, then noticed the door wasn’t fully shut. Jordan never pulled it closed properly. I nudged it open with my hip.

There were two pairs of shoes on the mat.

Jordan’s white sneakers lay where he’d kicked them off, and beside them sat a pair of cream heels with red soles, placed neatly side by side. I stared at them longer than I should have. I knew what those heels cost because I’d once stood in a department store and looked at the price tag for a full minute before walking away.

Then I heard the laugh. It was a woman’s, low and breathy, and it came from my living room.

I set the box down. My stapler slid out and clattered across the tiles, and nobody on the couch noticed.

Jordan was lying back on the cushions I’d picked out, his shirt open, and a blonde woman was straddling his lap with her dress bunched around her waist. His hands were on her thighs. Her mouth was on his neck. On the coffee table, next to my scented candle, stood a bottle of champagne and two of my wine glasses.

“Who the hell are you?” My voice came out higher than I wanted. “What are you doing in my… in our house?”

Jordan sat up so fast the blonde nearly slid off him. For half a second his face did something honest, and I saw fear there. Then it was gone, and something colder took its place.

The woman climbed off him without any hurry at all. She was maybe twenty-two, tall and tanned, with the kind of figure money builds in a private gym. She smoothed her dress down over her hips, picked up her clutch, and looked me over from my frizzy curls to my scuffed flats.

“You must be the roommate,” she said.

“I’m his fiancée. And you’re in my apartment. Get out.”

She smiled at that. She walked past me, close enough that her shoulder knocked into mine, and paused at the mat to step into those cream heels. “Cute place,” she said, and then she was gone, her footsteps clicking down the stairwell.

I went to the window without thinking. Down on the street she stopped beside my Corolla, pulled a key from her clutch, and dragged it along the driver’s side from the headlight to the back bumper. Then she climbed into the Maybach and drove away.

“Jordan.” I turned around. “She just keyed my car.”

He was buttoning his shirt. He didn’t look at the window. He looked at me, and there was nothing in his eyes I recognized.

“Don’t you ever talk to her like that again,” he said. “Do you understand me? Ever.”

I laughed, because surely he was joking. “Talk to her like what? She was on top of you on my couch!”

“That was Sienna Ashcroft.” He said the name as if it should mean something to me, and when it didn’t, he rolled his eyes. “Lucien Ashcroft’s daughter, Ivy. The richest man in South Valley. He owns half this city, and as of last month he owns me too. I’m a junior director at Ashcroft Holdings.”

Ashcroft Holdings. The grey suit at the front of the room. Absorbed.

“They bought my company this morning,” I said. “They laid me off.”

“Yeah, I heard.” He shrugged into his jacket. “Shame.”

“You heard?”

“Ivy, look at yourself.” He waved a hand at me, at my damp blouse and the pencil skirt straining over the hips he used to say he couldn’t keep his hands off. “You’re twenty-six, you’re unemployed, and you live on Harlow Street. Sienna’s moving me into a place in Crestview Heights. I’m done with all of it. Goodbye and good riddance.”

Then he held out his palm. “I’ll need the ring back. I paid for half.”

Something hot rose up my throat, and for once in my life I didn’t swallow it. I twisted the ring off my finger and threw it at his chest. It bounced off his shirt and rolled under the couch, and while he got down on his knees to fish for it, I walked into the bedroom, yanked his monitors off the desk, carried them to the window, and let them fall three stories onto the pavement.

He screamed my name. I slammed the bedroom door and leaned against it until I heard the front door bang.

When the apartment was finally quiet, I sat on the edge of the bed with my phone, because rent was due Friday and I needed to see where I stood. I opened our joint savings account, the one we’d nicknamed the wedding fund, the one I’d fed from every paycheck for two years.

There should have been fourteen thousand six hundred dollars in it.

The balance read zero. Everything had been transferred out at 8:52 that morning, twenty minutes before anyone told me I’d lost my job.