Divorce While I'm Pregnant? Fine, Let's Sign It! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Lemon Cookies

Otis gives her the recording and a job with a flat above the shop, on her own rent, and a letter from Holden's lawyers finds her there.

Libby's couch had a spring in it that found my hip at three in the morning.

I didn't sleep much anyway.

At six, she woke me with a travel mug and a subway card.

"My shift starts at seven," she said. "Stay here, eat everything in the fridge, and don't call him."

"I'm going to get the recording."

"From the guy with the apron?"

"He said it was mine."

"Men say a lot of things before nine in the morning," Libby said. She put a spare key in my hand anyway. "Text me every hour. I mean it."

The dessert shop opened at seven.

At five to seven, the sign on the door still said CLOSED, and a light was on in the back.

I knocked on the glass.

Otis came out wiping his hands on a towel.

In daylight he looked younger than he had in his apron the afternoon before, maybe thirty-five, with sandy hair going gray at the temples and a beard he kept short.

He unlocked the door and held it open without a word.

The shop smelled like butter and burnt sugar.

It was the first thing that had smelled like anything real in two days.

"Hearth & Honey," I said, reading the window from the inside. "That's the name?"

"My grandmother's hearth and her honey cake. Sit. I'll bring you something."

I sat on a stool at the counter, because the chairs had no backs.

He brought a plate with three lemon cookies on it, still warm.

"I didn't order these."

"They're not for ordering. They're for eating."

I ate one standing up, out of habit, then sat down and ate the other two.

When I looked up, he had a small black drive on the counter beside the plate.

"Table nine," he said. "Every angle, with sound, from the moment he sat down. I made two copies. The second one is in my safe."

"Why are you doing this?"

"Because I watched it happen on my floor."

It wasn't an answer, and he knew it.

I picked up the drive.

"You said he sat there. Do you know my husband?"

Otis's face didn't change much, but he put the towel down.

"A long time ago," he said. "We shared a dorm room. We haven't spoken in four years."

"That's all?"

"That's all I'll say before coffee."

I laughed, and it came out too loud in the empty shop.

"I need a job," I said.

I hadn't known I was going to say it.

"I trained as a pastry cook. I stopped two years ago. I don't have a card that works, I don't have a place to sleep that isn't a friend's couch, and I have a daughter coming in fifteen weeks."

"I know."

"I'm not asking for charity."

"I'd never offer it." He leaned his forearms on the counter. "I need someone to build a winter menu, mornings only, sitting down. Twenty-two an hour. There's also a flat upstairs. One bedroom, a radiator that bangs, nine hundred a month."

"I'll take both."

"You haven't seen the flat."

"I'll take it with the radiator."

His mouth twitched.

"Rent comes out of my pay on the first of every month," I said. "That's all. I don't owe you anything else, and you don't owe me anything. Not a favor, not a ride, not a lemon cookie. Nothing else owed either way."

"Nothing else owed either way," Otis repeated. "I can live with that."

"Then we're agreed."

"We're agreed."

I held out my hand across the counter.

He took it.

His palm was warm and dry and rough along the side of his thumb, from years of pans.

I let go first.

He took me up the back stairs to show me the flat.

It was small and clean, with a bay window over the street, and an old iron radiator that was already hissing.

A narrow bed stood against the far wall, made up with a patchwork quilt.

"Someone slept here?"

"My sister, when she visits. It's been washed."

I pressed my hand against the quilt and found I was trembling.

"Thank you," I said.

"You owe me nothing," he said. "That's the deal."

He went downstairs to start the morning bake, and I stood there at the window, looking at the street.

A black car was parked across from the shop, engine running, in a spot that said no parking.

I knew the plate.

A man in a dark overcoat crossed the street and came in the shop door below.

I heard a bell ring, then Otis's voice, polite and flat.

I went to the top of the stairs.

The man was a courier with a thin gray envelope.

"I have a delivery for Mrs. Greta Stroud," he said.

"She doesn't live here," Otis said.

"That's not what the sender says."

I came down the stairs with one hand on the rail.

I had been in the shop for forty minutes.

I had told no one but Libby where I was going.

Holden had known from the moment I left the penthouse.

I took the envelope.

The paper inside was heavy, with a law firm's name along the top, and it was only one paragraph long.

"Mrs. Stroud is directed to attend all prenatal appointments at the Stroud Private Clinic. Failure to attend will be recorded as evidence of unfitness."

I read it twice.

Then I looked at the black car through the window.

The back window was down, and Daphne was waving at me.

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