You Are My Destiny novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Reward
A cook in a Michigan diner hears a billionaire offer a fortune for the wife who gave him her sight, and a stranger holds up the ring Kira left behind.
The man on the diner television was offering one million dollars for my face.
He did not know it was my face.
I was standing at the pass with a plate of whitefish in each hand when the sound came up.
My boss had turned the volume up because the Lions game was over and the news had started.
"Stannard Freight announced today that its heir, Phillip Stannard, has returned to Chicago," the anchor said.
I would have kept walking, but the next word was my husband's name.
I had not heard it said aloud in seven years.
He stood at a podium in a charcoal suit, tall and straight, with his left hand flat on the wood.
I knew that hand.
There was a white scar across the palm, shaped like a fishhook.
I had kissed it a hundred times in a cabin that smelled of woodsmoke and lake water.
"Seven years ago, a woman gave me her sight," Phillip said.
His eyes were gray, and they looked straight into the camera.
They were open, and they were clear, and they saw.
One of them had been mine.
"I never saw her face," he said. "I never learned where she went."
"I am offering one million dollars to anyone who can bring me my wife."
A flash of cameras swallowed his next words.
The plates in my hands began to shake.
"Kira," my boss said from the register. "Your whitefish is going cold."
I set the plates in front of two truckers without seeing them.
"She had a clouded left eye," Phillip said from the television. "She hummed when she was afraid."
I was humming.
I had been humming under my breath since he said wife.
I stopped so hard that my teeth clicked.
"Mom."
Junie was at the end of the counter with her coloring book open to a horse.
She was six, with a dark braid and a gap where her front tooth had been.
She pointed her crayon at the screen.
"He said your name."
"He said a lot of names."
"He said Kira. That's yours."
"It's a common name."
"It's not," Junie said. "Nobody at my school has a mom named Kira."
Her gray eyes slid from the screen to my face.
They were exactly his eyes.
I had spent six years telling myself nobody would ever notice.
I wiped my hands on my apron and untied it.
"I'm done," I told her.
"You're on until close."
"I know. I'm sorry."
She looked at the television, then at me, then at the clouded left eye I had spent seven years keeping turned away from people.
She was sixty-three and had never asked me one question about Junie's father.
"Go," she said.
"I'll owe you a week."
"You'll owe me a postcard. Go."
I took Junie's crayons off the counter and her coat off the hook.
The tip jar had two hundred and eleven dollars in it.
I took that too, and she did not say a word.
"Are we going to see him?" Junie asked.
"We're going to Illinois."
"Is he my dad?"
I stopped with the coat half over her arm.
I had been rehearsing that question in the mirror for three years.
None of my answers had been for a diner.
"Put your arm in the sleeve, baby."
"That's not a no."
"It's a sleeve."
On the television, the cameras swung to the side of the stage.
A woman stepped up beside Phillip in cream silk, with blonde hair that had never been near a fryer.
Both of her eyes were clear and blue.
She took his arm, and he did not move his hand away.
The room on the screen went quiet.
"Mr. Stannard," a reporter called. "Is this her?"
The woman smiled at the lens, and I watched her lift her left hand.
On her third finger sat a thin brass band, dull and a little crooked, bought for eleven dollars in a lake gift shop.
I had set that ring on a hospital tray seven years ago and never touched it again.
"I'm Kira," the woman said. "I'm his wife."
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