The Don Played Broke to Test Me, So I Left With His Baby novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Open the Door
The sign over the shop door was repainted six weeks later.
It said Sorley and Mercer, Flowers, in green letters on white.
Tillie had held the ladder, and I had held the brush.
I wore my daughter on my chest in a cotton wrap while I worked the register, and she slept through the door chime and the phone and two arguments over peonies.
The birth certificate sat in the drawer under the till.
I had filled it out myself in the hospital bed.
Her last name was Mercer.
On the line marked father, I had written Cesare Lombardi, in my own handwriting, in ink.
The clerk had asked me if I was sure.
"I'm sure," I said. "It's my name on top."
At eight o'clock on a Thursday morning the door chimed and a tall man came in with the cold on his coat.
He had no men with him.
He did not have a camel coat anymore, either.
He wore a plain gray jacket, and there was paint on his cuff from the nursery wall he had finished the week before.
He walked to the cooler and took out a single white rose.
He laid it on the counter.
"One," he said.
"That's four dollars."
He put down a twenty.
I looked at it, and I looked at him.
It was the same twenty he had left for one rose the day he tried to buy the whole shop, and I had never told him I remembered.
"Keep it," I said, and pushed the bill back across the counter. "The rose is on the house."
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