I Had a Baby without You novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Table Forty
Morwen covers a shift serving the CEO she slept with, and the woman beside him claims to be the waitress who saved him.
The man at table forty looked right at me and did not know who I was.
I stood there with a silver tray and a pot of coffee, waiting for him to say my name.
He didn't.
Roark Draycott lifted his grey eyes to my face, slid them past it, and went back to his tablet.
Five years.
I had rehearsed that moment in a Duluth kitchen for five years.
I had pictured him dropping a glass or standing up so fast his chair fell over.
He asked for more cream.
"Of course, Mr. Draycott," I said.
My voice shook on the last word, and I hated it.
Rhona had begged me to take this shift.
She ran the dining room on the fortieth floor of Draycott Tower, and her second waiter had quit that morning.
"One night," she had said. "Serve the room, collect your cash, and go home to your diner."
I came back to Chicago for my mother's building on Damen Avenue, not for him.
That was the lie I told myself on the elevator.
The room was glass on three sides, with the whole city lit up below it.
He was the only guest.
He sat at the corner table with his back to the windows, a big man in a charcoal suit, taller than I remembered.
There was a thin white line of old tension around his mouth that had not been there five years ago.
Everyone downstairs called him the Ghost of Draycott.
He ran a billion-dollar company from one floor and never came to a party.
The people who worked here said he had not made eye contact with a stranger in years.
I did not understand it yet.
He was looking at my collar.
Then the doors opened behind me, and heels clicked across the marble.
"Roark, darling, you promised you'd let me order for you."
A blonde woman in a cream dress kissed the air beside his cheek.
She wore a tiny silver pin on her lapel.
I knew that pin.
It was shaped like a lantern, no bigger than my thumbnail, with a chip in the bottom corner.
My mother had pinned it to my apron the day I started waiting tables.
I had not seen it since a linen room in the dark.
My hands went cold around the coffee pot.
"Gretchen," Roark said, and his whole body eased.
He knew her by her voice and her perfume.
I would remember that later.
At that moment I only saw a woman wearing my pin, sitting down next to my daughter's father.
"And who's this?" Gretchen asked.
She smiled at me with all of her teeth.
"The extra girl," I said. "I'm covering for the evening."
"How nice. We were just talking about a waitress."
She laid a hand on Roark's sleeve.
"Five years ago, Roark was bleeding in a stairwell at the Draycott Hotel and nobody would stop for him."
"Gretchen," he said quietly.
"No, let her hear it, it's a lovely story." She turned her bright eyes on me.
"One waitress dragged him into a linen room in a blackout and stitched him up with her own sewing kit."
My mouth went dry.
"She stayed with him all night in the dark," Gretchen said. "And in the morning she was gone."
She touched the pin.
"That waitress was me."
The coffee pot rattled against the tray.
I watched her say it to him without a flicker, and I watched him believe her.
He turned his face toward her voice, soft and grateful.
"I'd be dead without her," he said.
I could have screamed.
I could have thrown the coffee into her smug face and told every empty chair in the room what she had stolen.
Instead I set the pot down very carefully on the white tablecloth.
My mother had taught me never to lose my head over a customer.
But my mother had also taught me that a lie told once is a mistake and a lie told twice is a plan.
"What a story," I said. "What did he say to you in the dark?"
Gretchen's smile did not move.
"He said a great many things."
"Of course he did." I wiped my hands on my apron. "I'm sorry. The specials, Mr. Draycott. May I read them to you?"
He looked up.
He still did not know me.
But he tilted his head toward my voice.
"Go on," he said.
I read the specials slowly, in the low voice I used for Poppy when she was falling asleep.
Halfway through the second line, I began to hum between the dishes without meaning to.
Four notes, then four more.
Roark put down his tablet.
The color left his face, and his fingers closed over the edge of the table.
"Stop," he whispered.
Gretchen's pin flashed in the candlelight.
"Where did you learn that?" he said.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend