6. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
I opened the folder.
The first page was dense with legal language, clauses and subclauses and whereases that swam in front of my eyes. But I’d spent ten months reading contracts, decoding the fine print that men like Stan couldn’t be bothered to understand. I knew how to find the important parts.
Marriage contract.
Party of the first part: Blythe Chadwick, née Montrose.
Party of the second part: To be determined.
I looked up. My hands were shaking, making the paper rattle. “What the fuck is this?”
“Language, Blythe.” My mother’s voice was crisp, efficient, the same tone she used when discussing seating charts or flower arrangements. The same tone she’d used my entire life when I was being inconvenient. “You’re not going to make us ridiculous twice.”
“Make you-” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t process what I was looking at. “This is a marriage contract. You want me to sign a marriage contract?”
“There’s a man.” Priscilla moved to stand beside me, one manicured finger tapping the folder.
Her perfume was too strong. It had always been too strong, that cloying floral scent that I’d come to associate with disappointment.
“A nobody. New money. Moved to Newport four months ago. No family, no name, no social standing whatsoever. He’s been trying to buy his way into society, but nobody will have him. ”
“I don’t-”
“I rang him from the car on the way over here.” She said it casually, like she was discussing the weather, like she hadn’t just told me she’d been arranging my second marriage while I was at a police station trying to get someone to believe my first husband had tried to kill me.
“While you were at the police station making a spectacle of yourself. I mentioned an arranged marriage to a woman from a good family, someone who could open doors for him. He said yes in four minutes.”
The room was spinning. I put my hand on the counter to steady myself, feeling the cold granite under my palm.
“Four minutes, Blythe.” My mother’s smile was thin and sharp, the smile she wore when she’d won something. “That’s what you’re worth on the open market. A man with no breeding and no connections said yes in four minutes because even he knows he can’t do better.”
“I’m not-” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “No. Absolutely not. I’m not marrying some stranger because you-”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I always have a choice.”
“Do you?” Priscilla tilted her head, studying me like I was a puzzle she’d already solved. “Let’s think about this clearly, shall we? The house you’re standing in - whose name is on the deed?”
I didn’t answer. I already knew.
“The cars in the garage. The credit cards in your wallet. The membership at the club, the accounts at the bank, the stocks and bonds and trust funds-” She ticked each item off on her fingers, her voice patient, almost kind.
The voice of someone explaining something obvious to a slow child. “Whose name is on all of it, Blythe?”
“I helped build-”
“You helped nothing.” Stan’s voice, flat and cold. “You inserted yourself where you weren’t wanted, you embarrassed me in front of everyone I know, and at the end of it all, your name isn’t on a single page. Not one document, not one signature. Nothing.”
I stood there in Reid Navarro’s borrowed shirt, too big, sleeves to my fingertips, still smelling faintly of his laundry detergent, and did the arithmetic.
The house was in the Chadwick family trust. I’d known that when I moved in, had thought it was romantic that Stan wanted to raise our children in the home where he’d grown up. Our children. The ones we’d never had. The ones I now knew we were never going to have.
The cars were registered to the company. A tax benefit, Stan had explained. It just makes sense.
The bank accounts were joint, but Stan was the primary holder. The credit cards were in his name with me as an authorized user. The investments were managed by Sandrine’s people, in Sandrine’s accounts, and I’d never thought to ask why my name wasn’t on any of them.
Ten months of restructuring. Ten months of saving the company. Countless meetings and dinners and negotiations, all conducted under the understanding that I was representing my family, protecting what was ours.
My name on zero pages of the deal.
Twenty-nine years old. Standing in my own kitchen. And I didn’t even own the clothes on my body.
“I’ll leave,” I said. My voice sounded far away, like it was coming from underwater. “I’ll walk out of here right now and figure it out. I don’t need your money. I don’t need any of you.”
I turned toward the door.
My father was standing in front of it.
Not menacing. Hollis Montrose had never been menacing in his life. He was just there, filling the doorway, doing what he was paid to do. His face was apologetic. His eyes were on the floor.
“Move,” I said.
“Sweetheart-”
“Move, Dad.”
He didn’t move.
“Sit down, Blythe.” Sandrine’s voice behind me, sharp as a knife. “We’re not finished.”
I turned around slowly. Sandrine had risen from her chair at the head of the island. She was walking toward me, her heels clicking on the tile, her face utterly composed. Every line of her body radiated authority, the authority of someone who had never been told no.
“You’re going to sign that contract,” she said. “You’re going to marry this man, whoever he is, and you’re going to disappear quietly. No more scenes. No more accusations. No more embarrassing this family with your hysteria.”
“And if I don’t?”
Sandrine stopped in front of me. Close enough that I could see the fine lines around her eyes, the careful work her dermatologist had done, the pearls at her throat that cost more than my parents’ house.
“If you don’t,” she said quietly, “then you leave here with nothing. No money, no references, no connections. No one in Newport will hire you. No one in Newport will help you. You’ll be a cautionary tale - the crazy Chadwick wife who accused her husband of murder and couldn’t prove it.”
“He did try to murder me.”
“Prove it.” She smiled, and it didn’t reach her eyes.
“You have one witness. A man who crawled out of nowhere, who happened to be bobbing in the dark exactly where you needed him. And you have us against him - an entire family, and every name in Newport that carries any weight at all. Whose word do you imagine wins that?” She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a whisper.
“Sign. You’re not welcome in this family again, and you can be grateful your sister is already pregnant, because otherwise, after the stunt you pulled today-”
She paused. Let the silence stretch.
“We’d simply make all of you disappear.”
Ivy laughed somewhere behind me. A bright, delighted sound, like she was watching her favorite show.
I stared at Sandrine. I stared at the woman who’d held my hand at her husband’s funeral, who’d cried with me when my grandfather died, who’d called me “my clever girl” every Christmas as she handed me a beautifully wrapped gift.
Who’d sent me books and flowers and handwritten notes when the pregnancy tests came back negative, month after month after month.
I couldn’t find her anywhere in that face.
“I need the bathroom,” I said.
Sandrine raised an eyebrow. “Now?”
“Yes. Now.” I was shaking again, but I made my voice steady. “Unless you want me to piss on your Italian tile.”
A flicker of disgust crossed her face. She stepped back, gesturing toward the hallway. “Second door on the left. Ivy, go with her.”
“I don’t need a chaperone to use the toilet.”
“Ivy. Go.”
I walked to the bathroom with Ivy three steps behind me. Her phone was still out, still recording. I could feel her eyes on my back like insects crawling.
The bathroom was small and white and spotless. I closed the door in Ivy’s face and locked it, and for a moment I just stood there with my hands braced on the sink, counting backward from ten the way you do when falling apart is not an option.
My phone was in the water. My wallet was in my purse, which was still on the yacht. Reid’s car keys were in my pocket, but Reid’s car was in the driveway and my father was blocking the door and even if I could get out, where would I go?
Reid’s phone.
I’d left it in the car. And even if I hadn’t. Reid couldn’t help me with this. Reid was down the hall being a stranger, and one wrong move would burn him too.
There was a landline on the bathroom wall. Decorative, I’d always assumed, who had landlines anymore? But when I picked it up, there was a dial tone.
There were exactly three numbers I still knew by heart. My mother’s. Stan’s office. And Blair Beaumont’s, unchanged since we were twenty, because Blair considered changing her number a form of surrender.
I punched it in. It rang once. Twice.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me,” I whispered.
A beat of silence. Then: “Blythe?”
“Blair.” I pressed my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound, my heart racing. “Blair, I’m at the Chadwick house. I’m in the bathroom. They’re trying to make me sign something.”
“What kind of something?”
“A marriage contract. To some stranger. They already made me sign divorce papers, and now there’s a second folder, and my father’s blocking the door, and-”
“Where are you exactly?” Blair’s voice had gone sharp, focused. “Which bathroom?”
“First floor. Near the kitchen.”
“Okay. Okay, listen to me.” I heard movement on her end, footsteps, a door closing. “I’m sending a car right now. Twenty minutes, tops. Can you stall for twenty minutes?”
“I don’t-” My voice cracked. “Blair, I don’t think I can leave. If I walk out with nothing, I have nothing forever. I need to know what they’re planning. I need to hear the rest of it.”
A pause. I could almost hear Blair thinking, calculating, the same way I did when I was trying to solve an impossible problem.
“Okay. Then here’s what you do. Don’t sign anything you haven’t read twice. Every page, every clause, every word in tiny print. Take a photograph of every single page - get your hands on a phone somehow. Borrow one. Steal one if you have to.”
“I don’t have-”
“Then memorize what you can. Names, numbers, terms. Anything that looks important.” Another pause. “And Blythe? Call me the second you’re out of that house. Any hour. Two in the morning, I don’t care. You call me.”
“Blair-”
“I have to go. Someone’s at my door. But I meant what I said - call me. We’ll figure this out.”
The line went dead.
I stood there for a moment, holding the receiver, trying to make my hands stop shaking. Then I hung up, flushed the toilet for appearances, and opened the door.
Ivy was leaning against the wall, phone still raised. “That took a while.”
“Nervous bladder.” I pushed past her. “It’s a medical condition. You should look it up.”
I walked back to the kitchen. They were all still there. Sandrine at the island, Stan against the counter, my parents by the door. The marriage contract was still open on the countertop, waiting for my signature.
I picked it up. Started reading. Slowly, carefully, the way I’d read a hundred contracts over the past ten months.
“What are you doing?” Sandrine’s voice was sharp.
“Reading.”
“We don’t have time for-”
“You want me to sign my life away to a stranger?” I didn’t look up from the page. “I’m going to read it first.”
The doorbell rang.
Everyone went still. Sandrine and Stan exchanged a look. My mother’s hand tightened on my father’s arm.
“Who is that?” Sandrine’s voice was ice.
“I don’t know,” Stan said. “The staff is gone. I didn’t-”
The doorbell rang again. Then a third time. Insistent.
I looked up from the contract. Through the kitchen doorway, I could see the front hall, the heavy wooden door, the shadow of someone standing on the other side of the frosted glass.
The shadow was enormous.