Page 60 of The Bride Bet

The handwriting was confident and slanting. The message was short.

You won. Fair and square. Expect the money in your account by Monday. — G.

Jasmine looked at it for a moment. Then she looked at Nate, who was watching her with the almost-smile she’d grown to love, the dry one that lived at the corner of his mouth.

“He’s actually paying,” she said.

“Apparently so. I hadn’t expected that. I wasn’t going to hold him accountable to it at all, and he hasn’t been hitting me up for money, so…” He trailed off with a shrug.

“After all that. After the investigator, and the leak, and…” She shook her head.

Technically, they still didn’t know for sure that Graham had been behind the investigator and the email leak, but there was no one else they could think of. And it was in the past anyway. They’d decided not to pursue either lead further. Besides, there were no potential leaks to worry about now, because they had nothing to hide.

“Graham’s a lot of things,” Nate said, setting the card down. “But I guess he honors a bet. I have to say, I respect him for it. Ialso won’t lie about being happy to have a hundred million.” He paused. “You have a hundred million,” he corrected.

“We do,” she corrected right back at him. “We’re married now, remember?”

“We did get married,” he said with a mischievous grin. “Within the year, give or take a little bit. He’s right. He lost.”

Jasmine picked up the card and looked at it again, feeling the strangeness of it settle over her. A hundred million dollars, the number that had once felt like the entire point, the thing she’d sold a year of her life for and almost lost her career over and very nearly her heart, was arriving to her and her new husband on Monday. It was an almost incidental detail at the end of a story that had become about something else entirely.

She set the card down.

“We don’t need it,” she said.

“You’re right,” Nate agreed. “We don’t.”

She glanced at her mother, three seats down, laughing at something Eden had said. The biggest thing she’d ever wanted in the world was security for her family that nothing could ever pull away. That was the thing she’d wanted the money to buy, the thing she’d been terrified she’d never have permanently.

But she did have it. She’d had it for a while now, and it had turned out to be built out of something other than money entirely.

“So let’s give it to charity,” she said. “All of it. Something for chronic illness research. Or arts funding for kids from nowhere towns who think they don’t have a shot.” She smiled. “Let Graham fund something good without ever knowing he did.”

Nate looked at her for a long moment, and the almost-smile became a real one, the eye-creasing one she’d first seen when he told her the story about the guinea pig.

“I love you,” he said. “You know that?”

“I do.” She leaned into him, and he put his arm around her. “I love you too.”

Down the beach, someone had started the music. Her mother was already on her feet. The candles flickered in their glasses against the evening wind, and the people she loved most in the world were all gathered in one place on a stretch of private sand, and there was nowhere any of them needed to be and nothing any of them wanted from her except her actual company.

Jasmine rested her head on her husband’s shoulder and watched the last of the light leave the sky. She had spent so many years afraid of losing everything she’d built, and she had never once imagined that what she’d build next would be the thing worth keeping.

She wasn’t afraid anymore.

That, in the end, had been the real fortune.

The End