Lethal Love novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: Come Alone

I stood in the back room with the empty cash box in my hands.

The alley door swung an inch in the wind and knocked against the bar.

I didn't have time to cry.

I had two hours and forty minutes, and a gown on a dress form.

I woke Gran.

She looked at the cot, the folded quilt, the gap on the shelf.

She didn't say I told you so.

She said, "Get the garment bag. The long one."

We zipped the gown into it.

Gran put on her good coat, the camel one she wears to funerals and the bank.

"I'm coming," she said.

"Your knees."

"My knees can sit in a cab."

Gran held the bottom of the garment bag across her lap like a sleeping child.

I texted Dom once from the back seat.

"Finished. Delivering now."

I didn't write anything about the back room.

He wrote back in under a minute.

"Proud of you. Eat."

I put the phone face down on my knee.

At 8:51 the doorman on Madison Avenue held the brass door open for us.

Gran looked up the curving white staircase.

"Who builds stairs like that?" she said. "People with elevators."

She climbed it anyway, one hand on the rail, one on my arm.

The creative director was waiting at the top with a coffee and her glasses on their chain.

She didn't say good morning.

She said, "Let me see it."

A model in a robe was already in the white room.

I put the gown on her myself.

Gran did the buttons.

Forty of them, from the bottom up, her old fingers quick and sure.

The model turned around.

The high collar sat exactly right under her jaw.

The back was bare to the waist, and the buttons ran down her spine and stopped where a hand would rest.

She walked all the way around her twice.

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