He Made Her His Wife for Seven Days. I Made Him My Ex. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Recipe Box

Sylvie goes to the suite for her grandmother's recipe box and finds Gretchen in her kitchen and Helen pouring tea; Gretchen warns her to keep her phone away from the building.

At nine on Day 2, I rode the staff elevator to the top floor of the Holloway Grand, because the guest one asked for a key card.

I had lived in that penthouse for four years.

My key card still worked.

That told me nobody in the building had thought to cancel it, and I took that as the first small mercy of the week.

I had left the bakery at eight, flour to the elbows, with Dee yelling after me to take a coat and a plan.

I had no plan.

I had one request: my grandmother's recipe box.

It was a tin box with a dented lid, and it held sixty years of her handwriting on index cards.

I kept it on the shelf over the stove, and it was the one thing in that apartment I had brought with me and not bought.

The front door was open.

I heard a cello being tuned somewhere inside, one string at a time.

Gretchen stood in my kitchen in a silk robe, a robe I had never seen, with my striped apron tied on over it.

She was cutting a lemon.

She saw me and the knife went still.

"Sylvie."

"Where is the tin box?" I said. "Above the stove."

"I don't know."

I looked at the shelf.

There was a candle there, and a small framed photo of Gretchen and Harrison at about twelve years old, in matching swim goggles.

It had not been there on Sunday.

"Who put that up?"

"I didn't," Gretchen said.

"Sylvie, darling."

Helen came in from the dining room with a teapot in both hands.

She wore the pearls and a cream cardigan, and she smiled.

"Sit," she said. "Have some tea. You're so thin. Did you eat?"

"I came for my grandmother's box."

"Oh, the box." She set the teapot down. "The housekeeping staff cleared the shelves yesterday for Gretchen's things. I'm sure it's in a bag for storage. I'll have someone look."

"Yesterday. The party was last night."

"Before the party." Her smile did not change. "Harrison said you wouldn't mind. You've always been so practical about things."

I stood very still.

If the shelves were cleared the day before, then someone had known on Sunday that I would be gone on Monday.

I did not say it out loud.

I took out my phone, because I wanted a record, and I set it on the counter to open the camera.

"I'm going to look in the closets," I said. "Myself."

"Of course, of course." Helen touched my arm. "Be gentle with Harrison, though. He didn't sleep. He came home at two in the morning looking miserable."

"He came from a hotel where I was staying."

"Did he?" Helen's eyebrows lifted, delicately. "Well. You see how much he cares."

I went down the hall.

The closet where I kept my coats was half empty.

My boxes were gone, my books were gone, the shelf over the bed was bare, and the hangers had been pushed to one side so there was room for somebody else's dresses.

Rose satin.

Black velvet.

A gown I recognized from a magazine cover of Gretchen in Vienna.

She had not just moved in for a week.

She had brought a season's wardrobe.

I went through every drawer.

No box.

I came back down the hall and Helen was gone, and Gretchen was alone at the counter, holding the knife and not the lemon.

"I didn't clear your shelf," she said, very quietly.

"I believe you," I said. "That's not better."

Her eyes were red along the lids.

"My father," she began.

"I know. Harrison told three hundred people."

"Sylvie." She looked at the kitchen door, then at the camera lens on my phone. Her voice dropped until I could barely hear it. "Pick up your phone."

I picked it up.

She stepped in close and reached for the apron strings, keeping her hands low.

"Don't leave your phone anywhere in this building," she whispered. "Not on the counter. Not in the car. Not in the lobby."

"Why?"

"Because someone is listening to it."

She turned and untied the apron and handed it to me.

Helen's voice came from the doorway, bright and easy.

"Gretchen, dear, the florist's on the line."

Gretchen went without looking back.

I stood in my old kitchen holding my own striped apron, and I put the phone in my coat pocket, screen against my body.

Helen smiled at me from the doorway.

"Did you find it?"

"No," I said.

"What a shame," said Helen.

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