Chapter 4: Flour and Blood

By nine that night, Callister's had sold out of everything but the sourdough, and Dee was counting the till with a pencil behind her ear.

"Say it again," she said. "She took your grandmother's box."

"Someone did."

"Someone named Helen."

"I can't prove it." I was scraping a sheet pan with more force than the pan deserved. "I can't prove any of it."

"You can prove it in my kitchen. I'll hold her down."

"Dee."

"I'll hold her down and you can search her purse."

I laughed, and the laugh broke in the middle.

The pan slipped.

It hit the edge of the steel counter, and a jar of vanilla beans I had left there went over and shattered across the floor.

I dropped to pick up the glass without thinking, and a long piece of it went straight into the heel of my left hand.

"Oh, that's a lot of blood," Dee said, in a very calm voice. "That's more than I wanted to see."

"It's fine."

"Sylvie, it's coming off your elbow."

The bell over the front door rang.

I looked up, with my hand clamped in a dishtowel, and Nathaniel Sterne was standing inside my shop with the door shut behind him.

He had come in out of the rain.

His coat was wet at the shoulders.

"You said you'd pay me back tomorrow," he said. "It's tomorrow."

Dee looked at him.

She looked at me.

"I'm going to go and wash a bowl," she said. "In the back. For a long time."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Made Her His Wife for Seven Days. I Made Him My Ex. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.