Beneath a Transparent Dream novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Where the Money Went

Matilda finds $180,000 drawn against her bakery and paid to Cora's studio; Zach and his mother Judith tell her to apologise, and Eli plays her a recording of Cora laughing about it before offering terms.

Matilda did not go home.

She drove to Pell Street and let herself into the dark bakery, and sat on a flour sack in the back with her phone.

The bank's website wanted her password twice.

The line of credit was there under her grandmother's building, which she had never once looked at.

Drawn in June: one hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

Paid out to Still Water Yoga LLC.

Matilda read the name aloud to the empty kitchen.

Still Water was the studio Cora had opened in June, the one with the bamboo floors and the little fountain.

Matilda had cut the ribbon, and Zach had given a toast.

She read the line again, and then she opened her photo album and found the picture of the signature page.

Zach had slid it across their kitchen table last spring with a pen on top, and said it was for the new oven.

The new oven had cost eleven thousand dollars, and she had paid for it in cash.

At four in the morning Dot Ferris unlocked the back door with her bandana already tied and stopped in the doorway.

"You slept here in that dress," Dot said.

"I didn't sleep."

Dot put the kettle on, then took one look at Matilda's bare left hand and turned the kettle off again.

"Is he dead or just dumb?" Dot asked.

"Dumb," Matilda said. "And he took money out of this building."

"How much?"

Matilda told her.

Dot said a word that she normally saved for the oven door.

At seven Matilda drove home to the house on Ocean Avenue, because her clothes were there and she was not going to let them keep her clothes.

Zach was at the kitchen island in his shirtsleeves with coffee, calm and rested.

"There she is," he said. "Tillie, you embarrassed me last night. But I'm not angry."

"A hundred and eighty thousand dollars," Matilda said.

His cup stopped halfway to his mouth, and for a moment he did not say anything at all.

"That's a bridge loan," he said. "For a client. It's temporary. You signed for it."

"I signed for an oven."

"Everything's in the paperwork, honey. If you'd read it."

"The client is Cora."

"Cora is not a client." He set the cup down. "Cora is your friend, and you humiliated her in front of forty people."

The front door opened before she could answer.

Judith Caldecott came in without knocking, in a camel coat with a white box from a pastry shop that was not Matilda's.

"I brought lemon tarts," Judith said. "Zachary called me. Sit down, both of you."

Matilda stayed on her feet.

"Your son moved money out of my building to pay for his girlfriend's studio," she said.

"His friend's studio," Judith said. "And the line of credit has my signature on it too, so you will lower your voice."

"I haven't raised it."

"Then keep it there." Judith set the box on the counter. "You will go to Cora today and apologise. In person, with something sweet. Then you and Zach will come to dinner on Sunday and we'll let the family hear nothing about this."

"The family has forty phones that heard everything."

"Then you'll apologise in front of those too."

Zach reached for her hand.

Matilda stepped out of range.

She went up the stairs, took a duffel from the closet shelf and filled it with her work clothes and her grandmother's recipe tin.

She left her good dresses where they were.

When she came back down they were both still standing in the kitchen, waiting for her to say yes.

She walked through them and out the front door.

Eli Harcourt's office was on the third floor of a brick building in the Old Port, over a shop that sold fishing sweaters.

The door was open when she got there at ten.

He stood up from a drafting table covered with paper and did not look surprised.

"You checked," he said.

"You knew about the line of credit," Matilda said. "How did you know?"

"Cora's accountant sent the studio's loan papers to our house. I read them."

"When?"

"In August."

She stared at him.

"It's October," she said. "You've had that since August, and you handed me my scarf last night and told me to drive carefully."

"If I'd told you in August you'd have asked Cora about it over lunch," Eli said. "She would have cried, and you'd have apologised to her."

That was true, and she hated it.

"I have something else," he said.

He turned a laptop on the drafting table toward her and pressed a key.

The room filled with the sound of his own kitchen.

A tap running. A cork. Cora laughing, bright and easy.

"She signed whatever he slid across, Zach. She'd sign a lunch menu."

Then Zach, close to the microphone: "She trusts me. It's the best thing about her."

Eli stopped the recording.

Matilda found she had sat down on his stool without being asked.

"I'd like to make you an offer," Eli said. "It has terms."

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