I Left Him at the Altar to Hide Our Daughter, and Now He Owns the Inn Where I Cook novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Somebody Else

In the walk-in Mara tells Lawrence there was another man that spring, and learns his mother told him she took two hundred thousand dollars and ran; then Blair says his mother's car just pulled in.

"Everybody out," Lawrence said. "Except the chef."

Nobody moved.

"Now, please."

The sous chef untied his apron. The servers backed into the dining room. The dishwasher looked at me, and I nodded, and he went.

Blair didn't move.

"Darling, I'll stay."

"Take the girl to see the lobby, Blair. There's a fish tank."

Poppy slid off her stool before I could stop her.

"There's an eel in it," she told Blair. "His name is Gary. I named him."

Blair held out two fingers for her to take.

They went out through the swinging door.

It flapped twice and stopped.

Lawrence walked past me and opened the walk-in.

Cold air rolled out across the floor.

"In here," he said.

I went in because the staff were right outside the door listening.

He pulled the heavy door shut behind us.

The fan hummed. My breath came out white. Forty quarts of cream sat on the shelf beside his shoulder.

"Is she mine?"

Six years, and the first thing he said to me alone.

I had rehearsed this.

In Portland, in a rented room, with my hand on my stomach.

In the hospital with Poppy asleep on my chest.

Every time a car with Massachusetts plates went down Front Street.

"No," I said.

"She was born in March."

"I know when she was born. I was there."

"Mara."

"There was somebody else that spring."

He laughed once, short.

"Who?"

"It doesn't matter who."

"It matters to me."

"Somebody who was here for the summer. He went home. He doesn't know about her, and he doesn't want to."

The lie came out smooth.

I'd sanded it down for years.

Lawrence leaned back against the shelf of cream.

He looked at me for a long time.

"That's why," he said finally.

"That's why what?"

"Why you took it."

"Took what?"

His mouth twisted.

"Don't do that. Don't stand there and look confused. My mother told me."

The cold was in my teeth now.

"Told you what, Lawrence?"

"That she found you that morning packing your car. That you asked her for money to go quietly. Two hundred thousand dollars."

He said the number.

"She wrote you a check because she thought I'd be better off. And you cashed it on Monday and I never saw you again."

I stood very still.

That was what he'd been told.

That I'd asked.

That I'd taken it to a bank and signed the back with a pen and walked out with his life in my purse.

For six years he'd thought that.

He'd lain awake on that.

"I used to wonder what you spent it on," he said. "Now I know. Diapers for some summer guy's kid."

"Don't."

"I sat in that church for two hours and ten minutes, Mara."

His voice didn't go up.

It went down, which was worse.

"The organist played everything she knew. Twice. My mother had to send people home with the favors."

I wanted to tell him.

I wanted it so badly my hands curled into fists in my apron.

Then I saw it again.

The sunroom on Ledge Road.

The cream tablecloth.

His mother's pale finger tapping the check toward me.

"Thayers are raised by Thayers," she'd said. "I have the lawyers and the judges. You have an apron. You'd see it at Christmas."

Poppy was in the lobby right now with his fiancee.

Poppy, who named eels.

"I'm sorry," I said.

It was the only true thing I could say.

"You're sorry." He nodded slowly. "Okay."

He pushed off the shelf.

"Here's what happens. You've got a contract through the season."

"You'll cook through Labor Day, because I can't open without a kitchen and I haven't got time to find another chef."

"And then?"

"And then you're done here."

"This is my kitchen."

"It's my kitchen. I bought it on Friday."

He reached past me for the door handle.

His arm came so close to my shoulder that I felt the warmth of it through the cold.

I knew exactly what his skin smelled like.

Salt and cedar and soap.

My body remembered before I could stop it, and I hated it for that.

He stopped with his hand on the handle.

For one second he didn't push.

For one second we stood there breathing in the same small cold room.

Like it was six years ago and we were hiding from his mother in her own pantry.

"You cut your hair," he said.

I didn't answer.

He shoved the door open.

The kitchen was full of people pretending to work.

The sous chef was chopping chives that were already chopped. The dishwasher was rinsing a clean pot.

Blair stood at the swinging door with Poppy's hand still held loosely in two fingers.

Her smile was very bright.

"There you are," she said. "Darling, your mother's car just pulled in."

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