Chapter 24: Ask Me Tomorrow

Two weeks later, Jessamine hung the new sign herself, standing on a stepladder in the cold with a screwdriver in her teeth.

It said JESSAMINE'S in plain gold letters over a new green awning.

In the corner of the front window, where the red JUDAS had been scrubbed down to a pink ghost, she had painted a small gold moon.

"Don't cry on my glass," she said, coming down the ladder. "I just cleaned it."

"I'm not crying."

"You're doing the thing where your chin goes."

I laughed, and she hugged me with the screwdriver still in her fist.

The bakery smelled of cinnamon and burnt sugar, and there was a line out the door.

A third of it was people who wanted a picture beside the moon.

"She pleaded guilty on Friday," Jessamine said, as she handed a woman a box of rolls. "Sybil. Roscoe told me. Eleven years."

"I heard."

"Did you read her letter?"

"No."

"Are you going to?"

"It's in a kitchen drawer under the takeout menus," I said. "Maybe someday. Not today."

"And the twelve million?"

"It went into the fund on Monday, next to his, in my mother's name."

"All of it?"

"I kept enough to buy into your lease," I said. "The trust sold it to me."

Jessamine opened her mouth, and shut it again, and wiped her eyes on her apron.

She slid a bag of rolls across the counter to me with my name in marker on the side.

"For the coat rack," she said. "He's been standing across the street for ten minutes pretending to read a parking sign."

I looked.

Stefan was on the opposite sidewalk in a plain gray sweater, holding a paper cup.

He was studying a parking sign with great attention.

He had a job now, at a small hotel across the river.

He ran its front desk and its books for a modest salary.

He had never once asked me to come with him anywhere.

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