His Love Came Too Late, I'm Already Another's Wife novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Lease

Eldon walks into the bakery at the morning rush and gives Maia thirty days. Eli faces his father and Maia overhears a question she does not understand.

Wednesday morning, Hensel's Bakery had a dozen people in line and the ovens were behind on the rye.

I was boxing a dozen cinnamon rolls for the dentist next door when the bell over the door rang in a way I knew.

Eldon Ward does not enter a room. He arrives in it.

He wore the same charcoal suit as at the gala, and a man in a thinner suit followed him carrying a leather folder.

The line went quiet.

"Maia," Eldon said, pleasantly. "You look well. Marriage agrees with you."

"We can talk in the back."

"I'd rather talk here. I find it saves time."

He stopped at my counter and looked around my mother's shop. At the chalk menu. The bell. The old oak shelves she'd sanded by hand.

"This building was one of my first purchases," he said. "I let your mother rent it when nobody else would. I've let you rent it for thirteen years."

"I pay the rent on the first. I've never been late."

"No. You haven't." He held out a hand without looking, and the man behind him put a paper in it. "The lease is month to month. It always has been. Thirty days' notice from either side."

He laid the paper on the counter, on top of the dentist's rolls.

"As of today, I am giving notice."

Somebody in line said, "Oh, come on."

I picked up the paper and read it. My hands were steady. I was almost proud of them.

"Is this because I married someone?"

"It is because you married a mistake," Eldon said, so calmly that it took a second to land. "You've humiliated my son and made a spectacle of my family, and you did it in a courthouse hallway with a mechanic."

"You humiliated me in front of three hundred people."

"I offered you a check."

"You offered me a Thursday."

A woman in line laughed, and then clapped a hand over her mouth.

Eldon's face did not change.

"There is a way to fix this," he said. "Annul the marriage. Come to dinner Sunday. Be gracious to Zara. Keep the shop."

"And if I don't?"

"Thirty days, Maia."

The bell rang again.

Eli stood in the doorway with a paper bag of flour on one shoulder, in a work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and grease on both forearms. The scar was in plain sight.

I hadn't known he planned to bring flour. I hadn't asked.

He set the bag down by the counter, very carefully, and looked at his father for the first time that I'd ever seen.

"Eldon."

"Elijah." Eldon used the full name, the one nobody else did. "I wondered when you'd turn up."

"You're in my wife's shop."

My heart did something I'd rather not have felt.

"It's my building."

"It's her shop."

"You've always wanted what's Preston's. Even as a boy, standing at the fence at the lake house, staring."

"I was nine," Eli said. "Preston was six and I was staring at the dog."

The line shook with something between laughter and terror.

"Eli," I said. "I've got this."

He looked at me, and his shoulders came down a little. "I know you do."

I turned back to Eldon and picked up the notice.

"I'll take the thirty days. I'll bring you rent on the first and the fifteenth, in cash, in front of whoever's in line, and you can come and pick it up yourself."

"You think a lease is a game?"

"I think my mother's name is on that window. And you'll need a better reason than your son's feelings."

I tore the paper in half and then in half again and set the pieces on the dentist's cinnamon rolls.

The man in the thin suit made a small noise.

Eldon looked at me for a long time.

Then he turned to go. He stopped beside Eli, close, and I should not have heard what he said next. The bakery was too quiet.

"Does she know what you cost me?"

Eli stood very still.

"No," he said.

Eldon smiled, thinly, and walked out into the street.

The bell rang behind him. Nobody in the shop moved, and then the retired man who bought two rye loaves every morning said, "I'll take a dozen of those rolls, Maia. I'll take them for the whole fire station."

The line broke into talk.

I stood there with flour on my apron and my husband's father's words in my head.

What did he cost him?

Eli picked up the flour again, and I saw his hand was shaking, only a little.

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