She Took the Rags, I Took the Empire novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Porch Light

Sleeping in Dinah's childhood bed, Cora finds Elias at the door at 1 a.m. with her suitcase, and the morning news shows Dinah wearing her ring.

The woman in the robe took one look at my wet dress and pulled me inside by the wrist.

"You'll catch your death," she said. "Sit."

The kitchen was yellow and small, with a table wedged against the wall and four chairs that didn't match.

A man in a cardigan sat at the table with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.

He stood when I came in, and I recognized his frayed cuffs from a morning eighteen years ago.

"Hello, Cora," he said, as if I'd been gone a weekend.

I was too cold and too angry to say hello back.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"At your house, I expect," Dinah's mother said. "She left this afternoon."

"She humiliated me in front of sixty people. She took my fiancé."

"Eat something first," Dinah's mother said. "Then you can be furious on a full stomach."

She put scrambled eggs and buttered toast in front of me, and I ate all of it, which I hated.

Dinah's father set a dry sweatshirt on my chair that said THE DIME on the front in cracked white letters.

"Our diner," he said. "She'll show you."

"I'm not here for the diner," I said. "I'm here because my sister told a ballroom to send me here."

Neither of them argued.

Dinah's mother only looked at her husband, and he looked at the table.

Then she took me upstairs to a room under the roof with a narrow bed and a slanted ceiling.

"This was hers," she said. "She asked us to keep it ready."

"Asked when?"

"Years ago. Get some sleep, honey."

She shut the door.

I sat on Dinah's bed in Dinah's sweatshirt and looked at the wall above the pillow.

It was covered, floor to ceiling, in newspaper clippings.

Every one was about Ellingham Hotels. A ribbon cutting in Boston. A new tower in Chicago. Leopold Ellingham shaking a mayor's hand.

Some had red circles around the dates, and a few had been pinned there so long the paper had gone brown.

I thought, she wanted it so badly she kept a shrine to it.

I thought, she picked the rags and spent eighteen years staring at what she'd given up.

I lay down with my back to the wall and didn't sleep.

At one in the morning, someone knocked on the front door.

I came down the stairs in my bare feet, and Dinah's father was already there in his socks, holding the door open a hand's width.

"It's for her," he said, and let go.

Elias Haddon stood on the porch in a black overcoat, rain dripping off his hair.

He had a suitcase in one hand, and one corner of it was scorched.

"Mrs. Ellingham told the housekeeper to burn your things in the service lot," he said. "I got there first."

I took the suitcase and my hands shook on the handle.

My mother's locket was in the zip pocket, and so was my passport.

I hadn't known how much I needed both until I felt them through the leather.

"Thank you," I said. "Why did you do that?"

"Because it wasn't hers to burn."

"You work for them."

"I do."

He said it flatly, and he didn't try to make it sound better.

The porch was cold, and I was standing in a wet-hemmed silk dress and a diner sweatshirt, shivering.

Elias took off his overcoat and put it around my shoulders.

His hands stayed on the collar for a moment while he fastened the top button.

They were cold, and rough at the edges, and they didn't hurry.

I looked up, and he was already looking at me.

There was a scar through his left eyebrow I had never noticed in three years of passing him in the lobby.

"Lock the door behind me," he said. "Stay off the Ellinghams' network. Don't call Quentin."

"Why would I call Quentin?"

"Because you'll want to," Elias said. "Don't."

He went down the steps without his coat and walked into the rain.

I stood with the porch light on my face and his coat on my shoulders, and I did not know what I felt.

I slept an hour after that, in his coat.

At seven, Dinah's father called me down for coffee.

The little television on the counter was on, with the sound turned low.

A news anchor in a blue suit was smiling at a photograph.

"Ellingham Hotels announced overnight that Dinah Ellingham, the long-lost daughter of chairman Leopold Ellingham, will marry company vice president Quentin Thorpe on the fourteenth."

The photograph showed my sister on Quentin's arm, in a cream suit, in front of the Ellingham ballroom doors.

She was holding up her left hand for the camera.

It was my ring.

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