The Wife He Left for a Baby That Wasn't His novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Order

Sam admits he booked the cake and knew for three weeks; Willa refuses his help, and the Rutledge firm posts that the couple separated in the spring.

I let him in because the alternative was talking through a one-inch gap in a van window at five in the morning.

I turned on the ovens first.

Then I put a bag of flour on the steel table between us, because I wanted something heavy within reach.

Sam Rutledge stood by the door and didn't come closer.

"You ordered the cake," I said.

"Yes."

"You paid cash and asked for delivery in person. You picked the exact hour."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He looked at his hands.

They were big hands, scarred across the knuckles, and he held them still.

"I couldn't write it down," he said. "I tried three times. I'd have sent you a letter and Kyle would have been at your door in an hour, telling you it was a misunderstanding, in that voice."

"What voice?"

"The one that sounds like it's trying to help you."

I didn't say anything.

I had heard that voice twelve hours earlier.

"So you made me find out in front of forty people," I said.

"I made it so you couldn't be talked out of it."

"You don't know me well enough to know whether I could be talked out of anything."

"I met you once. You gave a toast at your wedding about your grandmother's yeast starter."

I had forgotten that.

He hadn't.

That was a bad sign, and I put it somewhere to deal with later.

"How long have you known?" I asked.

He took a while to answer.

"Three weeks."

I picked up a bench scraper and set it down again.

"Three weeks ago, a man came into my shop on a Tuesday," I said. "Big man, canvas jacket. He bought one loaf of sourdough and asked how much a wedding cake cost."

"Willa."

"I rang him up. I gave him a sample of the lemon. I told him the baker who started this place used to say bread was the only honest thing in a kitchen."

"I remember."

"You stood at my counter and you knew."

"Yes."

"And you bought bread."

"I came to tell you," he said, and his voice went rough. "I got as far as the door. You were laughing at something with a woman and her kid. You looked so happy, I walked up to the counter and bought a loaf instead."

"That's the worst thing you could say to me."

"I know."

"I made a cake for Kyle's going-away dinner that week. I wrote Safe Travels on it, in blue piping, with a little airplane."

"I know that too. You posted a picture of it. The airplane was crooked."

I had no answer to that.

It was almost funny, in a way I could not afford.

"You could have called me," I said.

"He's my brother. I thought I'd get a better version of the truth if I had proof and a place to put it."

"And now you've put it."

"Now I've put it," Sam said.

The ovens ticked as they heated.

I pulled my apron strings tighter, because my hands needed something to do.

"What do you get out of it?" I said.

"Nothing."

"Nobody in that family does anything for nothing."

"Then you know why I'm not in the family."

That one landed.

I looked at him for a while.

He didn't look away, and he didn't try to be charming about it, and that was the first thing about him that I liked.

"Here's what I'll do," he said. "I'll go to a lawyer with you. I'll give a statement about what I saw at my father's house, what I heard Preston say on the phone, the whole thing. I'll stand beside you in a courtroom if it comes to that."

"No."

"Why?"

"Because it makes me a woman your family stole from and you rescued. I'm not going to be your weapon against your brother."

"You wouldn't be."

"I'd be the cake you served him."

His jaw moved.

"You can do it without me," he said. "But you'll be doing it against all of them."

"I know how many of them there are."

"Do you?"

"I saw the whole room at the party."

The corner of his mouth went up, and the scar through his eyebrow went up with it.

Then my phone buzzed on the steel table.

It buzzed again.

Then it kept buzzing.

I picked it up.

The first message was from a woman I had never met, a stranger on social media.

You should be ashamed of yourself. She's pregnant.

The next one said, Crazy wife crashes baby shower.

I opened the link under it.

It was a statement on the Rutledge Development page, posted at four-forty.

It said that Kyle Rutledge and his wife of five years had separated in the spring, that the family was heartbroken by the disruption of a private celebration, and that the company asked everyone to respect Mrs. Rutledge's emotional difficulties at this time.

In the spring.

I had pressed his charcoal suit the night before he left.

My email chimed.

It was the bride whose three-hundred-guest wedding cake I had been working on for six weeks.

Ms. Garrick, after some thought, we feel we must cancel our order. We hope you understand.

Beneath it was a second email, and then a third.

Sam read my face from across the table.

"What?"

I turned the phone around and held it up.

"They started," I said.

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