He Humiliated Me in Public, So His Regret Pays by the Tear novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Knife Roll

Halina takes her knives and her grandmother's recipe binder from under Lena's nose, learns the eighty thousand was called a gift, and gets paid again as the door closes.

I went back for my knives on Monday because I did not trust anyone else to touch them.

Kral Table does not open until five.

At eleven in the morning the dining room was chairs on tables and a man mopping.

I walked through it with Marta behind me and went straight to the kitchen.

My knife roll was in the drawer where I had left it, under the pastry station.

I picked it up.

It weighed what it had always weighed.

My recipe binder was gone from the shelf above it.

"Looking for this?"

Lena Baran stood in the kitchen door in a camel coat and heels, holding my binder against her chest like it was hers.

It was a three-ring binder with a fraying blue spine.

It had my grandmother's handwriting on the first page, and my own for the other three hundred.

"Give me that."

"I can't, Hal. It's company property."

"It's a binder," I said.

"It's Kral Hospitality's recipe archive." She said it gently. "You signed the employee handbook in 2019, and it assigns all recipes developed on premises to the company."

"I developed them in my kitchen, in my apartment, for two years before there was a premises."

"Then you should have written that down."

Behind me, Marta said something in Polish that I will not translate.

Lena did not blink.

"Dominik says the eighty thousand your grandmother gave you was a gift. To him. Toward the first restaurant." She tilted her head. "He mentioned it was never a loan. There's nothing on paper."

I had not spoken about the eighty thousand in front of anyone in three years.

It was the money from my grandmother's two-flat on Archer Avenue.

She had put the check in my hands and told me to make something with it.

I had put it in the LLC that built the kitchen where I was standing.

And my husband had told his girlfriend it was a gift.

"He said that to you," I said.

"He tells me everything."

"Does he."

"Yes," Lena said.

I stepped closer.

She was a few inches shorter than me, even in heels.

I had been lifting thirty-pound sheet pans since I was fifteen.

She stepped back first.

Dominik came through the swinging door from the walk-in with his phone in his hand and stopped dead.

He looked at me, and at the binder, and at Lena, and he went pale.

"Hal. I didn't know you were coming in."

"For my knives."

"Okay. Of course. Take them." He took a step toward me.

"Did you tell her the eighty thousand was a gift?"

His eyes slid to Lena and back.

"Hal, can we not do this in the kitchen?"

"Yes or no."

"I might have said something like that. Once. When we were figuring out the books," Dominik said.

"Once."

"It's complicated. It's an LLC. It's not that simple."

"It's that simple," Marta said.

I looked at him, and for the first time since Friday I stopped being angry and just saw him.

He was a good cook who had never been a good man.

I had mistaken one for the other because they lived in the same body.

"I'm taking the binder," I said.

"Hal."

"It's got my grandmother's hand in it. You can sue a dead woman if you want."

Lena's mouth tightened.

She looked at Dominik for backup, and he stood with his phone in both hands and said nothing.

That was when I knew he would never stop her.

He did not have the spine to stop either of us.

I took the binder out of her arms.

She let it go, because Marta was standing at my shoulder and Marta can hold a grudge in two languages.

I tucked the binder under my arm with the knife roll and walked toward the back door.

"See you in court," Lena said behind me.

I did not turn around.

"You'll want a better lawyer than him," I said.

It was a little early to be that mean, but it felt good.

In the alley, the cold hit my face and the back door closed behind us.

My phone buzzed against my hip once, hard.

[Regret detected. Source: Dominik Kral. Cause: the back door closing. Payout: $6,400.00.]

I stood in the alley with a binder, a bag of knives, and money I had made off his misery.

I had meant to be ashamed.

What I felt, standing there, was awake.

"What?" Marta said. "What is it?"

"I think I just got paid again," I said.

"How much?"

"Six thousand four hundred."

Marta looked at the back door of Kral Table for a long moment.

"Okay," she said. "So we're doing this."

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