He Chose His Pregnant Mistress. I Was the Bratva Princess. novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Bench
The café on the corner of Halsted opened at six.
I stood across the street at ten past, in my old green coat, and looked at the bench.
It was an ordinary bench, painted dark green, with a bent slat at one end and a crack down the leg.
For five years a man had left a cup on it every morning.
I had thought it was a rule.
Lev stood beside me with his hands in his pockets.
He was wearing a brown jacket.
I had picked it out myself, from the rack in a shop on Archer, and told him the grey coat was retired.
"It looks smaller from this side," he said.
"The bench?"
"The street."
We crossed.
The man at the café counter looked up when the bell rang.
He was sixty or so, bald and round, with a dishtowel over one shoulder.
He had sold Lev the same coffee for five years, and I had walked past his window on a hundred mornings and never gone in.
"Good morning," I said.
"Good morning, Princess."
I stopped.
"You know?"
"Everybody on Halsted knows," he said comfortably. "We know the man in the coat is yours. We know your father sends a car to the dry cleaner's on Mondays." He took two paper cups from the stack. "We also know you make a good lemon tart."
"I haven't made one on this street in five years."
"No," he said. "That's why we noticed."
He turned to the machine and began to fill the cups, and Lev looked at the floor to hide a smile.
"What's your stall called?" the man said.
"I don't have a stall."
"You have one." He nodded at the window.
I looked out.
Across the road, by the old flower seller's stand, a man on a ladder was hanging a board over an empty shopfront.
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