Chapter 3: Fifty Dollars On The Night Stand

My left shoe was under his bed, and I had to lie flat on a carpet that probably cost more than my car to reach it.

The bathroom door was shut and the shower was running. Grey morning light poured through a wall of glass that looked out over the whole of South Valley, with the river curling through it and the towers of the financial district so close I could have read the logos on them if my head hadn’t been pounding. I grabbed the shoe, sat up, and caught my reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall. My hair was wild, my blouse was buttoned wrong, and there was a mark on my neck that hadn’t been there yesterday.

Last night came back to me in pieces. His hands. His voice in my ear, low and rough, asking if I was sure, and then not asking anymore because I’d made it very clear. The way he’d taken his time with me, as though he had nowhere else in the world to be. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and waited for the shame to arrive.

It never quite did. What came instead was panic.

I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know what he did, beyond making difficult people do what he wanted. I’d gone home with a total stranger on the worst day of my life, and now I had two choices. I could walk out past him, or I could wait for him to come out of that bathroom and look at me in daylight.

I chose walking out.

My purse was on an armchair by the door. I grabbed it, and that was when I noticed his watch on the nightstand. It was heavy and plain, platinum maybe, the sort of watch that doesn’t need diamonds to tell you what it’s worth. Beside it lay his wallet and a phone that kept lighting up with notifications. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t want to know.

But I remembered what I’d said at the bar. Could I afford you? And I remembered his answer.

It was stupid. It was the whiskey still in my blood, and three years of swallowing every bit of pride I had, finally coming back up. I opened my purse, took out the last of my cash, two twenties and a ten, and laid the bills flat beside his watch. Then I found a pen, tore a corner off the notepad by the phone, and wrote my note.

For your services. Worth every cent.

The shower shut off just as I closed the door behind me.

The bus home took fifty minutes, and I spent all of them refreshing my banking app as if the money might come back on its own. It didn’t. I had two hundred and eleven dollars in checking, a credit card that had been declined last night, and nineteen hundred dollars of rent due on Friday.

Mrs. Delgado was waiting on the landing when I came up the stairs. My landlady was sixty, barely five feet tall, and had never once in two years said good morning to me.

“Your boyfriend’s men were here at seven,” she said. “They took a TV, a couch, the bed frame. Made a lot of noise.”

“The couch was mine. I paid for that couch.”

“Not my business.” She folded her arms. “And there’s glass all over the sidewalk under your window. Somebody’s going to cut themselves. You clean it, or I charge you.”

“Mrs. Delgado, I need a few extra days on the rent. I lost my job yesterday, and Jordan…”

“Friday,” she said. “Nineteen hundred. I have a waiting list full of people who’d love this unit, and none of them throw computers out the window.” She went back into her apartment and shut the door in my face.

Inside, my place looked as though it had been robbed by someone with a grudge. The couch was gone, and four dents in the rug marked where it had stood. The bed frame was gone too, leaving my mattress on the floor at an angle. My scented candle had been knocked off the coffee table, and nobody had bothered to pick it up.

My phone rang. It was my mother, for the fifth time since last night.

I answered because I was too tired not to. “Hi, Mom.”

“Do you know who called me at eleven o’clock last night?” She never said hello when she was angry. “Jordan. Jordan called me, Ivy, crying, saying you threw his things out of a window and attacked him.”

“I didn’t attack him. He cheated on me. On my couch. And he took fourteen thousand dollars from…”

“And what did you do to make him look elsewhere?” She let that sit. “Three years I’ve watched you push that boy away with your attitude. Now he’s found someone with a future, and you’re twenty-six with no ring, and he tells me you’ve lost your job as well. What am I supposed to tell your aunties? What am I supposed to tell the people at church?”

I sat down on the mattress. “You could tell them your daughter’s having a bad week.”

“Don’t get smart with me. Call him and apologize. Maybe he’ll take you back once this other girl gets bored of him.”

I hung up on her. I had never hung up on my mother in my life. My hands were shaking, and I couldn’t tell if it was anger or the hangover or something worse.

I opened I*******m without meaning to. It was muscle memory, the thing my thumb did whenever my brain wanted to stop. And there he was, right at the top of my feed, because I’d never unfollowed him.

Jordan had posted twelve minutes ago. It was a photo from some garden party at a sprawling estate, and the caption said it had been taken on Sunday afternoon, the day after he’d proposed to me. He was in a linen suit I’d never seen, grinning, with Sienna Ashcroft hanging off his arm in a gold dress. Below it he’d written: New chapter. Grateful to be welcomed into the family. 🥂

Beside them, with one hand resting on Sienna’s shoulder, stood a tall man in a dark suit. His hair was going grey at the temples, and his face was turned slightly toward the camera with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile.

I zoomed in until his face filled my screen. Those grey eyes. That hard mouth I’d kissed in an elevator at midnight.

Under the photo, Sienna had commented: Love you Dad, thank you for making it official ❤️ @lucienashcroft

The phone slid out of my hand and landed on the mattress.

I’d slept with her father. I’d slept with the richest man in South Valley, the man whose company had laid me off and who was about to become my ex-fiancé’s boss.

And I’d left him fifty dollars for it.