Chapter 14: Breakfast Is Served

Elise's POV

Dot slapped her phone down on the counter at seven the next morning.

"Read it," she said. "Then don't throw anything. It's my phone."

It was a gossip site, and the headline was in red.

HARMON'S WIFE "NOT WELL": HIDES ABOVE DINER WITH WIDOWED COOK.

I read the first line, and then the second.

The piece said I had walked out on a genius in the middle of his greatest year.

It said friends were worried about my state of mind.

It said I was carrying a child and refusing to name the father.

It said Sydney Lundy had been fired from the film for taking my side and calling it a friendship.

Then it said the man I was living with was a widower.

His wife had died four years ago in a kitchen fire at the same diner, and "no one was ever charged."

I looked up.

Seth was standing in the kitchen doorway with a spatula in his hand.

He had read it already.

His face had gone completely flat.

"Seth," I said.

"It's fine."

"It's a lie."

"Some of it's true." He set the spatula on the rail. "She did die in a fire. I wasn't charged because there was nothing to charge."

He untied his apron and hung it on the hook.

"I need ten minutes," he said. "Dot, can you run the grill?"

"I can run the grill," said Dot. "Go."

He went out through the back door, and it closed softly.

The regulars had gone quiet.

There were nine of them at the counter, and a teenager in the corner booth with his phone out.

A man in a feed-store cap held up his own phone.

"That's a damn lie," he said. "Seth Satterfield pulled his wife's chair out for her every day of his marriage. I saw it."

"I saw the fire truck," said a woman at the end. "He tried to go back in. They held him on the sidewalk. He burned his arm on the door."

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