I Had a Baby without You novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Say Something

Morwen corners Gretchen in the walk-in and refuses her money; Morton's notice says the diner will be bought.

"My mother sang it," I said. "It's an old lullaby."

Roark's hand did not leave the table edge.

"What's it called?"

"Little Lantern."

Something moved across his face and was gone.

"I've heard it before," he said. "Once."

Gretchen laughed, a bright, quick sound.

"Darling, everybody has heard a lullaby once. She's humming because she's nervous."

"What's your name?" he asked me.

He asked it to the air a foot to my left.

"Morwen," I said. "Morwen Cafferty."

He repeated it under his breath.

"Roark, your four o'clock," Gretchen said, and stood so fast her chair scraped.

She took my elbow in a grip that left marks and steered me toward the service door.

"The kitchen needs you," she said sweetly. "Now."

I let her take me.

I wanted her somewhere without a window.

The walk-in cooler hummed behind steel doors at the back of the kitchen.

Gretchen shut it on both of us and the cold hit my face.

She let go of my arm and the smile fell off her.

"I don't know who you are," she said, "and I don't care."

"You know exactly who I am."

"I know you hummed a song you shouldn't know." She opened her purse and pulled out a checkbook. "Twenty thousand dollars."

She clicked her pen.

"Take it and be on a bus by morning."

I looked at the check as she wrote it.

Twenty thousand would have covered the roof on my mother's diner twice.

"Where did you get that pin?" I asked.

"It was a gift."

"It has a chip in the lower left corner, from the day I dropped it on the pavement outside Cafferty's."

My breath was a white cloud in the cold.

"My mother tied a thread through the back because the clasp was loose.

Is the thread still there?"

Her eyes dropped to her own lapel.

It was a half second, no more.

But I saw it, and she saw me see it.

"I don't want your money," I said.

"Everyone wants money."

"I want you to take that off and give it back."

"Or what?

You'll tell Roark?"

She leaned in, her perfume sweet and cold.

"He won't know your face from a doorknob, sweetheart.

He'll take my word over yours in a second."

I did not understand that sentence.

I filed it away anyway.

"Then ask him something only the waitress knows," I said. "Ask what he said about the radiator."

Gretchen went very still.

"What radiator?"

"He told me it banged like someone knocking to be let in," I said. "He laughed so hard he cracked a stitch."

For one moment her pretty mouth hung open.

Then she shut it and laughed.

"Roark has told me every detail of that night, many times. You'll have to do better."

"I will."

"You'll lose, and you'll be sorry."

She tore the check in half and dropped the pieces on the floor.

"I've spent five years making sure nobody takes his gratitude from me."

She flung the door wide and swept out.

I stood among the crates of lemons with my heart going like a fist on wood.

She had admitted it, nearly.

Gratitude, not love.

She had built five years on a thing that belonged to someone else, and she was afraid.

That was good.

Afraid people make mistakes.

I picked up the torn check and stuffed it into my apron pocket.

I do not know why.

Maybe I wanted to remember what twenty thousand dollars looked like when it was an insult.

Rhona found me by the dessert station five minutes later.

She had her black vest on crooked and her face had gone white.

"Morwen," she said. "A courier just left this at the host stand for you."

"For me?"

"With your name on it. Your real one."

It was a heavy cream envelope with a gold crest I recognized from every rent letter I had ever dreaded.

DRAYCOTT HOLDINGS.

I tore it open with one thumb.

The letter was two paragraphs long.

It was addressed to the owner of 2214 Damen Avenue.

It said Draycott Holdings had exercised its right of first purchase on the building that housed Cafferty's Diner.

It said the sale would close in thirty days.

It said the tenant should vacate and that no further notice would be given.

At the bottom, over a printed line, was a signature that took up half the page.

*Roark Draycott.*

I read it twice.

"Is that a forgery?" Rhona said.

"It's a rubber stamp." I turned the page over, as if there might be something on the back. "He doesn't even know I exist."

"Maybe he does now."

I thought of Roark's hand gone white on the table.

I thought of the lantern pin on Gretchen's lapel.

I thought of my daughter asleep in the room above the diner, curled around a stuffed rabbit, with her father's grey eyes closed.

"Then he's going to find out what he signed," I said.

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