After He Gave My Wedding Away, I Built My Empire novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Twenty Minutes

Locked out of her shop, Cassandra carries out every order before the padlock goes on, and a stranger offers his loading bay. Her mother meets her at the curb with a demand.

Three men in work vests were standing outside my shop when the bridal car pulled up.

One of them held a padlock the size of a fist.

My shop manager and my four pourers were on the sidewalk with their aprons still on.

Behind the glass, Broughton & Daughter looked the way it did every Saturday morning, with the lights off and the shelves full.

I got out in my torn wedding dress and a set of satin shoes I had never broken in.

"Who sent you?" I asked.

The man with the padlock held up a paper. "Thackeray Row. The tenant surrendered the lease at nine this morning."

"I'm the tenant."

"The lease is in Mr. Thackeray's name, ma'am. You're listed as an occupant."

I remembered signing as the occupant fourteen months ago.

Colin had said it got us a better rate, and I had kissed him for it.

"My stock is inside," I said. "Six hundred and twelve orders are boxed and labeled for pickup today."

"I can't let anyone in."

"Then you're going to hold my customers' packages."

"That's a civil matter."

Hattie got out of the car behind me and held up her phone.

"I'm filming this," she said. "The runaway bride story is already up to nine thousand views. Do you want to be in the sequel?"

The man looked at the phone.

Then he looked at the people stopping on the sidewalk, and the woman across the street who had already pulled out her own phone.

He stepped aside and called someone.

His voice dropped and I heard only part of it. "Yes, ma'am. No, ma'am. There's a crowd."

He hung up.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "Take what's yours and not a candle more."

"It's all mine," I said.

"Then take it fast."

We went in.

I carried the first stack of boxes out with my veil still pinned to my head.

My shop manager carried the second, and the pourers formed a line down the sidewalk and passed the rest hand to hand.

Hattie ran the van she kept for her night shifts back and forth to the curb, and filled it twice.

I went to the back room last and wrapped my grandmother's three copper pour pots in a bath towel.

They had been in my family for sixty years.

I carried them out against my chest, and the crowd on the sidewalk, about forty people by then, clapped.

I did not feel like someone who deserved applause.

I felt like someone who had just lost a building.

At the curb, a box truck backed in with a long beep.

The door said Merrow Home in green letters.

A tall man in a canvas coat climbed down and looked at the stacked boxes, and then at me.

His nose had been broken once, and it had healed a little crooked.

"Cassandra Broughton," he said.

"I don't know you."

"Caleb Merrow. I run the stores that carry your two best candles." He nodded at the truck. "I saw the video. I have an empty loading bay at my warehouse on Dock Street with a roof and a door that locks. You can have it."

"For what?"

"For nothing."

"Nobody gives away a bay for nothing."

"Ninety days," he said. "I don't take equity, and I don't take a cut. At the end you either have a place of your own or you don't."

I looked at my shop manager, who was standing with a box in her arms and a face full of hope.

"Ninety days," I said. "No equity. And I don't sleep with the landlord."

He blinked.

"I'm not your landlord. I'm an empty bay."

"An empty bay with a landlord's key is a landlord."

"Fine," he said, with the corner of his mouth moving. "Then you've named the rules, and I'll stay in my office."

"You do that."

We shook on it.

His hand was warm and rough, and he let go first.

We loaded the truck, and the van, and the back seat of the bridal car.

When the last box was in, the man with the padlock snapped it onto my door and walked away without looking at me.

My mother was standing on the sidewalk.

I had not seen her come.

She wore the gray dress she had bought for the wedding, and her hands were folded in front of her.

"You humiliated that woman in front of two hundred people," she said.

"I know what I did, Mom."

"Do you know what Rowena Sayre paid last year?" Her voice shook. "She paid your father's hospital bills. All eighty-one thousand dollars."

I stood there with my grandmother's pots in my arms.

"Go back to the chapel," my mother said, "and apologize."

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