Chapter 3: Tomorrow
Harold spent the morning attempting to control a story that no longer centered on him.
He suggested I cancel. He suggested we meet Owen together. He suggested, with a thin laugh, that two million dollars was a gesture that required legal caution and perhaps a donation structure that kept the Prescott Foundation in the frame. I dressed, took a cab, and left him standing in the foyer with the tablet and the residual smell of last night’s whiskey.
Owen Rodgers waited in a private dining room of a quiet hotel, no press, no paddles, no audience trained to laugh on cue. He stood when I entered, and the solemnity from the stage was still there—less performance than gravity.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“You bid two million dollars for a stranger in a blue dress,” I replied. “I think I owed you the conversation.”
He did not smile. He opened a slim folder and turned it so I could see a photograph: a younger woman with my eyes, a different last name on a faded campus ID, a date that sat years before Harold Prescott had ever introduced me as his effortless wife.
“Your father and mine were partners,” Owen said. “When the company collapsed, your family disappeared into a new name and a quieter life. My father spent the rest of his years believing he had failed people who depended on him—including a girl who was supposed to inherit more than silence. I promised him I would find you if you were still alive. Not to collect a debt. To return what was never his to keep buried.”
My hands, folded for so many galas, finally tightened.
Harold had auctioned me as merchandise for a joke.
Owen Rodgers had spent years searching for Anastasia Robbins—
and the door the auction opened
was not
the one
my husband
thought
May you like
he
controlled.
