Shattered Illusions: The Wife He Left for Dead novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Miri Ash

In Port Alder the quay bakery customers read a million-dollar reward for Mireille Hayes aloud while she serves them. Roz calls: he is contesting. The bell rings and Killian walks in.

In Port Alder, Maine, the quay bakery opened at five, and I had been Miri Ash for twenty-three days.

I was good at it by now.

I could stack forty rolls into a paper sack with one hand and take a fisherman's money with the other.

The owner had known Roz thirty years and asked me nothing.

She gave me a back room with a hot-plate, a clean apron and a cash wage, and she called me "kid."

The stitches had come out on day ten.

I still felt for them with my fingers when I was tired.

On the twenty-third morning the quay was full of fog and the shop was full of men with wet boots.

A television hung in the corner above the pastry case, and the owner never turned it off.

"Two coffees and a cinnamon," said a man in orange waders, and I rang it up.

"Lord," said the woman behind him. "Turn it up, it's that Boston fellow again."

The owner turned it up.

Killian was on the screen in a gray suit, outside the Hayes Holdings tower.

He looked thinner.

A line ran across the bottom: HAYES OFFERS ONE MILLION DOLLARS FOR NEWS OF MISSING WIFE.

"My wife was injured in a fall," he told the cameras. "She left the hospital confused and alone. She needs medical care and she needs to come home."

I held the coffee pot still.

"A fall," I said.

"Poor man," said the woman. "They say he hasn't slept. They say she's been unwell a long time, the wife. Fragile. A head thing."

"Who says?" I asked.

"It's all over the internet, hon."

Another voice from the back of the line said, "I'd hate to think she's in the water."

"She's not in the water," said the man in waders. "A woman like that, rich as that, she's in a spa in Switzerland laughing at all of us."

The line laughed.

I poured their coffee.

I put the lids on, slid the cinnamon roll into a bag and gave back the right change.

He had told the whole country I fell.

He had told them I was confused and unwell, and a poor man had been left behind, and nobody had asked who put me on the marble.

"She'd be better off with him," said the woman, taking her bag. "Rich man like that, begging. You don't get that twice."

"No," I said. "You don't."

She took it for agreement and left.

The next customer was a girl of maybe twenty, with a phone in her hand and her eyes on me.

"Excuse me," she said. "Has anyone told you you look like her?"

"Like who?"

"The missing wife. Mrs. Hayes."

Everyone near the counter looked at me.

"I get that a lot," I said. "It's the hair."

"Your eyes, too," said the girl. "Can I take your picture? My cousin would die."

"No."

"One picture..."

"No," I said. "Do you want the sourdough or not?"

She bought the sourdough and went out, glancing back through the window as she went.

I stood very still behind the counter and made myself breathe slowly.

The owner took my elbow.

"Back room," she said. "Now."

In the back room I sat down on a flour sack, and she shut the door.

"That girl's going to post you," she said.

"I know."

"You want me to say I never saw you?"

"I want you to keep selling bread," I said. "I've got a lawyer."

My phone had been a pay-as-you-go from the drugstore for three weeks.

It rang in my apron.

Roz went straight to it.

"Where are you standing?"

"The back room of the bakery."

"Sit down."

"I'm sitting."

"Hayes's counsel filed in family court yesterday," Roz said. "They asked the judge to set aside your signature. They claim you signed the papers with a head injury, in hospital, with no capacity."

I laughed.

It was a short, ugly laugh, and the owner looked at me.

"It's a clever filing," Roz said. "He doesn't deny what happened. He just says you didn't know what you were doing."

"I knew what I was doing. I was the only person in that building who did."

"The judge may order a medical review. In person, in Boston."

"No."

"If you don't come, they'll call it proof."

"Roz."

"I'm telling you what he's doing," she said. "He is not going to let you go quietly. He is going to say you are sick and he is going to keep saying it."

I looked at the flour on my shoes.

"Then I'll just have to be well in public," I said.

"Mireille, I can't tell you to..."

Out in the shop the bell over the door rang, and the whole room went quiet.

Not the ordinary quiet of a Tuesday morning.

It was the kind of quiet a room makes when someone expensive walks into it.

The owner opened the back room door half an inch and looked through.

She turned back to me and said, very softly, "Kid. There's a man out here asking for Mrs. Hayes."

I stood up and tied my apron.

I walked out to the counter, and Killian was standing in the middle of the shop with his coat wet from the fog.

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