They Gave The Good Match To Her And A Replacement To Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Live

The story was on every gossip page by nine.

It had a photograph of me in the Ashcroft hall holding a thick cream envelope.

It had the headline "THE BAKER AND THE LEVERETT HOUSE."

Under it, an unnamed friend of the family said I had been paid to disappear, had taken the money, and had then attached myself to a disabled man with a boathouse worth four million dollars.

There was a line about my mother.

There was a line about the flat above the laundromat.

Gilbert's name was nowhere in it, and I knew whose it was in every sentence.

I read it standing between two gravestones, and then I drove to the bakery.

My boss had the shutters half up.

She was a stout woman who had been calling me "kid" for six years, and she looked at my face and unlocked the door without a word.

There were already people on the pavement outside.

Two men with cameras, a girl with a phone, an old man who came every Friday for a seeded loaf.

"They've been here an hour," my boss said. "I told them we weren't open."

"Can I open?"

"It's your shop as much as mine today."

I put on an apron.

It smelled of butter and flour and all the mornings of my life before the gala.

I propped my phone on the cake stand behind the till, with its screen turned to the room, and I pressed the red button.

Then I unlocked the door.

They came in all at once.

"Molly! Molly, did you take the money?"

"Is it true you're marrying Ethan Leverett for the house?"

"Do you have a comment on your mother?"

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