When He Finally Found Her, She Was Already Married novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Harbor Pie Day
Stevie is announced as Mrs. Davis Ferris on stage, and a wet-coated stranger calls her Steph. He wrote her forty letters; she never got one.
"Three years running," the woman from the harbor committee said into the microphone. "Mrs. Stevie Ferris and her blueberry-lemon pie."
Four hundred people clapped on the pier.
I climbed the stage steps with flour still on my forearms and my five-year-old on my hip.
Posy had told everyone in line that the winning pie was hers too.
"Mama Steph, wave," Posy whispered.
I waved.
My husband stood at the foot of the steps with his pen-stained cardigan and his glasses pushed up on his head.
He gave me the thumbs-up he gave every judge, every client and every parking officer.
He was my husband, on paper, and my friend for much longer than that.
The woman handed me a blue ribbon and a check for two hundred dollars.
"Mrs. Ferris," she said, smiling, "tell the crowd your secret."
"Cold butter," I said. "And I never tell the truth about the lemon."
People laughed.
That was when I saw him at the back of the crowd.
He was the only person standing still.
He was tall, with a long wool coat soaked through from the morning rain, and he held no pie and no paper plate.
His hair had gone gray at the temples, which it hadn't been seven years ago.
His eyes had not changed.
"Steph," he said.
I could not hear it over the crowd, but I saw his mouth make the word.
Nobody here called me Steph.
I was Stevie to the whole harbor, and Mama Steph to one girl, and the name I was born with had been in a box since I was twenty-two.
Posy's arm tightened around my neck.
"Mama Steph, you're squeezing."
"Sorry, bug."
I walked down the steps and put her in Davis's arms.
"Who's that?" he asked quietly.
He had followed my eyes.
"Somebody from Boston," I said.
Davis looked at the man. Then he looked at me.
"I'll be right here," he said. "Whoever he is, Steph, he can't take anything from you. It's all settled. It's been settled for years."
I nodded.
I touched the front of my shirt, where a plain steel ring hung on a cord against my skin.
Then I walked across the pier.
The crowd opened for me, because they were proud of me, and every person said congratulations as I passed.
I did not answer one of them.
He didn't move until I stopped an arm's length away.
Up close he was thinner. There was a crease between his eyebrows that had not been there before.
"Declan," I said.
"You look the same."
"I don't."
"You do," he said. "You've got flour on your chin."
I did not wipe it.
My hands were shaking, so I put them behind my back where he couldn't see.
"How did you find me?"
"A magazine ran a picture of the pie winner. I'd know that scar anywhere."
He lifted a hand toward my eyebrow and stopped before he touched it.
"Six years, Steph. I had four investigators. One of them quit on me."
"You could have saved the money."
"Why?"
"Because you already gave me your answer," I said. "You sent it in the mail."
He frowned.
I held out my left hand.
The gold band Davis had put on it three years ago caught the light.
"I'm married, Declan. That man over there is my husband and that little girl is our daughter. Go back to Boston."
I had practiced that sentence for years, in the shower, in the dark, over the bread dough.
It came out steadier than I felt.
Declan looked at the ring for a long time.
Something crossed his face and then it was gone, and what was left was careful.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"I believe you." His voice dropped. "Can I ask you one thing before I go?"
I should have said no.
"One."
"Did you ever get my letters?"
The pier noise went on around us, the band tuning, a kid shrieking, someone frying dough.
"What letters?" I said.
"I wrote you forty of them. To your old apartment, then through every address I could find."
"I never got a letter from you."
"Not one?"
"Not one. Not a note, not a call, not a card. Nothing from you, in seven years, except an envelope from your family's lawyers."
His face changed.
It went very still.
He looked at the harbor, then at the ring on my hand, then back at me.
"Then somebody made sure of that," he said.
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