I Left Him at the Altar to Hide Our Daughter, and Now He Owns the Inn Where I Cook novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Ten Past Six
The new owner of the Harborlight walks into Mara's kitchen with his fiancee, tells her staff she left him at the altar, and asks how old the little girl with his eyes is; Mara says four, and Poppy says five, born March twelfth.
The new owner of the Harborlight Inn walked into my kitchen at ten past six.
My daughter turned around and looked at him with his own eyes.
I was piping meringue onto forty lemon tarts.
The bag kept squeezing in my hand after I stopped telling it to.
Lawrence Thayer stood in the swinging door in a pressed white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.
Six years older.
Harder in the jaw.
Still wearing his father's steel watch.
Poppy sat on her stool by the pass in a paper chef's hat, licking lemon curd off a spoon.
She looked up at the stranger in the door.
Grey-green eyes.
Not grey, not green.
The color of the harbor in March, under a low sky.
I had only ever seen that color in two faces in my life.
One of them was five years old and sticky.
The other was staring at her.
Lawrence's hand stayed flat on the door.
"Hi," Poppy said. "Are you the boss? Mama said the boss was coming and everybody has to be good."
He didn't answer her.
His eyes came up from her face and found mine.
I watched him know me.
A woman stepped in around him, tall and blonde, in a white linen dress that had never been near a stove.
She had a square diamond on her left hand the size of a sugar cube.
"Oh, it's so quaint," she said. "Darling, look, they still have the copper pots."
"Everyone, this is Blair Winslow," Lawrence said. "My fiancee."
His voice hadn't changed at all.
That was the worst part.
The sous chef wiped his hands. The dishwasher turned off the sprayer. The two servers came in from the dining room with their order pads.
Lawrence walked to the center of the kitchen.
He didn't look at me again.
"As of this morning I own the Harborlight," he said. "My family built it. I grew up on that dock. I'm not letting it rot."
"You have one summer. By Labor Day this place is in the black, or it's sold and the building comes down."
The sous chef looked at me.
Everyone always looked at me.
"I'll be meeting each of you this week," Lawrence said. "If you can't give me the whole summer, tell me now and go."
"The menu's going, obviously," Blair said, smiling at the tarts. "Nobody drives to Maine for pie."
"They drive for her pie," the dishwasher muttered.
Blair laughed.
Lawrence turned his head and looked at me then, straight across the steel table.
"I know your chef," he said.
The room went quiet.
"Six years ago she was supposed to marry me in the white church on the green. Two hundred people came. She didn't."
Somebody set a tray down very slowly.
"She didn't call. She didn't leave a note. She just left."
He said it to the whole room.
"So let me be clear about one thing. I don't keep people who walk out."
Blair's hand flew to her mouth.
Her eyes were bright.
She was enjoying it.
"Lawrence," she said. "You never told me she was here."
"I didn't know she was here."
My face burned so hot I could feel it in my ears.
I set the piping bag down.
My hands were shaking and I didn't want them to see.
The front desk girl had come to the doorway to listen.
So had the housekeeper.
By noon the whole of Front Street would know.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "I have a kitchen to run."
"For now," Lawrence said.
Poppy tugged my apron.
"Mama, what's an altar?"
Nobody breathed.
"It's the front of a church, baby."
"Why did you leave the front of a church?"
"Eat your curd."
Lawrence was looking at her again.
He was looking at her the way you look at a word you know but can't place.
Her curls. Her chin. The way she held the spoon in her fist.
His father had held a fork like that.
I'd sat across from that man at Sunday dinner for two years.
"Is she yours?" Lawrence asked me.
"Yes."
"How old is she?"
I didn't even think.
"Four."
It came out of me too fast and too flat.
Poppy dropped her spoon on the counter with a clatter.
She sat up as tall as a five-year-old can sit.
"I am not four," she said, outraged. "I'm five. I had a cake with a whale on it."
"Poppy."
"My birthday is March twelfth," she told Lawrence, because he was the boss and the boss should know. "I'm five and a quarter."
Lawrence went very still.
I watched it happen.
I watched him go back from March.
February. January. December.
One month at a time.
September. August. July.
June.
The fourteenth of June.
His eyes came up to mine, and they were the same eyes my daughter had, and they were not cold anymore.
They were something much worse.
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