The Billionaire Didn't Know His Maid Was His Wife · Mira Lang

Chapter 3: What Sabine Found

She didn't call the police, and she didn't shout, and she didn't ask me what was in my hand.

She came in, shut the door, and sat down in Callum's chair.

"Sit," Sabine said.

I sat.

"You've had the number for how long?"

"Since this afternoon. Mr. Ardent gave it to me for the florist envelope." I put the envelope on the desk between us, which was the one true thing I could offer. "He's in Rotterdam. Mrs. Dunbar's in hospital."

"And the book under your arm?"

I have never been a good liar and I did not try.

"It belonged to my father," I said.

Sabine's eyebrows went up half a centimetre.

"Go on."

"His name was Marcus Calloway. He was a financial controller at Ardent Holdings for nineteen years. In 2013 four transfers went out of a subsidiary account and he was named for them and dismissed, and the industry was told, and he could not get work as a bookkeeper in a strip-mall tax office after that." My voice was doing the flat thing. "He hanged himself in the September. This is the ledger he kept by hand. It shows the transfers went out on four days when he was two hundred miles away at a hospital with my mother. Gerald Ardent removed it from his office on the twelfth of April, 2013, and it has been in this safe ever since."

The room was very quiet.

"You came here for it," Sabine said.

"Yes."

"Under a false name."

"My mother's name. It's on my agency file legitimately." I looked at her. "I've stolen nothing and I've done my job properly. If you want to call somebody, call them. I'm not going to put this book back."

Sabine looked at me for a long moment. Then she did something I did not expect: she reached over, poured two inches of Callum's whisky into a glass, and slid it across the desk to me.

"Drink that," she said. "You're shaking."

I drank it.

"My father," Sabine said, "sold a shipping business in 2007 by lying about the condition of nine vessels. I found the survey reports when I was nineteen. I have never told a living soul and I never will, because I live on that money and so does my brother, and I have made an entire personality out of an art foundation to avoid thinking about it." She said it without any drama at all. "So when I tell you I know what a family safe smells like, I want you to understand it as sympathy."

I put the glass down.

"You're not going to tell him?"

"That's the wrong question." She sat back. "The right question is which of the two things you're hiding you'd like me to keep quiet about."

Everything in me went still.

"There's a ledger," Sabine said, "and there's a wedding date that keeps moving, and there's a housekeeper who arrived four weeks before an engagement was announced, and who my fiancé — who has not held a conversation over eleven minutes with any woman in the three years I've known him — sits with for two hours every evening while apparently discussing napkins."

"That's not—"

"Junie," she said.

The name went through me like ice water.

"His lawyers gave me the file in June," Sabine said. "There's a photograph on the marriage licence. It's a bad one, and you've got seven years and a great deal of grief on you since, and I don't believe he'll ever see it because men look at housekeepers the way they look at door frames." She tilted her head. "I looked at it for a fortnight, because it was the face of the woman I've been in a legal queue behind since June."

I stood up.

"Sit down," Sabine said, quite kindly. "I'm not going to do anything about it tonight. I want to know one thing first and I want the truth."

"Ask."

"Did you come into this house for the ledger, or for him?"

"For the ledger," I said. "I did not know he'd be here more than twice a month. I did not know there was a wedding. I have spent six years trying to make a lawyer's office answer a letter about that certificate and being ignored, and if you want to know what I actually feel about your fiancé — I have thought of him roughly once a year, as an eleven-minute transaction that ruined my credit rating."

Sabine held my eyes for a long moment.

"Good," she said. "Because I don't want him."

* * *

That is not the sentence I was braced for.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said I don't want him." She turned the whisky glass slowly on the desk. "He's a decent man and he's lonely and he asked me in a moment of what I can only describe as administrative panic — his father has been circling the chairmanship since February, and a man with a fiancée and a wedding date is harder to unseat than a man with an irregular marital status and no allies. I said yes because my foundation needs the Ardent Trust's money for three more years."

"That's—"

"Cold. Yes." She smiled slightly. "You're in a house where a man bought a wife for eighty thousand dollars to keep a company from his own father. Nobody in this zip code marries for love, Miss Calloway. We marry for governance."

I sat down again, mostly because my legs had made the decision.

"Then what do you want?"

"I want the wedding to happen," Sabine said. "September. As announced. Because Gerald Ardent has a board meeting on the second of October, and if Callum is married by then, the trust vote holds and Gerald spends the rest of his life on a boat." She looked at me steadily. "But he cannot marry me while he is married to you. So one of two things happens, and you're going to choose which."

"Go on."

"One: you go to a lawyer of my choosing, tomorrow, and sign the dissolution as Junie Calloway. It's uncontested, it takes eleven weeks, we make September by nine days. You are paid properly this time, and you take your father's ledger out of this house with my blessing, and Callum never learns that the woman who planned his engagement dinner was his wife."

"And two?"

"Two," Sabine said, "is that you tell him yourself. Which will blow the wedding, blow the vote, hand Gerald Ardent the company on the second of October — and, incidentally, hand him the man who is currently the only obstacle between your father's ledger and a shredder."

She stood, and picked up her coat.

"I'll be honest, I'd prefer option one," she said. "But I've watched you two through a study door for three weeks, so I'm not going to insult either of us by pretending I don't know which one you'll pick."

At the door she stopped.

"You should also know," she said, "that Gerald has been asking about the new housekeeper. He asked Mrs. Dunbar for your agency file on Monday, and Mrs. Dunbar, who is a great deal cleverer than anyone in this house has ever noticed, told him it was in the office and that she'd have it to him next week."

"Why would he—"

"Because your father's name was Calloway," Sabine said, "and Gerald Ardent is a frightened old man who has been waiting eleven years for somebody to come and ask him about a blue book. He doesn't need to recognise your face, Junie. He only needs to see the word Marsh on a form and remember that your mother's obituary listed her as Elizabeth Marsh Calloway."