Lethal Love novel · Chapter 10 of 32

Chapter 10: The Back Door

Dom was on his feet before Cosima finished.

He had his phone at his ear and his coat in his other hand.

I grabbed his sleeve.

"Was it you?"

He looked down at my hand, then at me.

"No."

"Your men?"

"No." He didn't blink. "I gave you my word on Shore Road. I don't give it twice."

I let go of his sleeve.

He bent and said something in Cosima's ear, and she nodded and took her apron off.

"Cosima drives you home," he said to me. "Lock the door. Don't open it for anybody you don't know."

"Where are you going?"

"To find her before somebody else does."

He was gone before the door finished swinging.

Cosima drove a dented red hatchback like she was being chased.

She didn't talk until we were on the Gowanus.

"He's never done that before," she said.

"Done what?"

"Laughed in my restaurant." She changed lanes without looking. "Not since the funeral."

At the shop she came in with me and didn't leave.

At nine the next morning Gran came downstairs and found Cosima asleep on the fitting-room bench in her chef's whites.

I was at the cutting table with the pattern pieces spread out.

"Is that the cook?" Gran said.

"Chef," Cosima said, without opening her eyes.

"Can you hold scissors?"

"I can bone a duck in forty seconds."

"Then you can cut silk," Gran said, and turned the radio up.

The ladies came at ten.

Nobody had called them.

The retired teacher took one look at the silk and went home for her good scissors.

The sisters brought a tray of baked ziti and stopped arguing for the first time in thirty years.

By noon the shop looked like an operating room run by an Irish grandmother.

Gran cut the bodice pieces with her hands steady as a surgeon's.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Lethal Love from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.