He Sent Me Overseas to Marry Her, I'm Staying Overseas to Never See Him Again novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Arch

In a Bermondsey railway arch, a hostile trunk maker blocks the door and his grandmother hands Laura a needle, and Laura learns why her signature matters: clause nine.

I didn't sign it on the plane.

I didn't sign it in the taxi from Heathrow either, though I read it four more times.

The driver dropped me at the end of a cobbled lane in Bermondsey and refused to go further.

"Cobbles," he said. "Murder on the suspension, love."

So I dragged two suitcases down the lane on a Sunday morning, past a café and a row of brick houses.

Above me, a train came over the viaduct and the whole street shook.

The arch was the fourth one along.

A brass sign over the top said HADDON & SONS, EST. 1884, and somebody had polished it recently.

The green double doors were open a foot.

I knocked anyway.

The doors swung wide, and a very large man filled the gap.

He was tall and broad, with a short dark beard and a leather apron over a flannel shirt.

His sleeves were rolled to the elbow.

His hands were scarred across the knuckles and holding a mallet.

He looked at my suitcases, then my trench coat, then my face.

"So you're the one he sent to shut us."

"I'm Laura Kendrick," I said. "Head of the international division."

"I know who you are. We got the email Friday." He didn't move. "Assess the viability of the London operation. Very nice. Who writes like that?"

"Lawyers."

"Lawyers," he agreed. "So go and assess it from the pub."

Another train went over.

A jar of brass buckles on a shelf behind him chattered against the wood.

"Oliver Haddon," a voice said from inside. "Move your great backside and let the woman in."

He shut his eyes for a second.

Then he stepped aside.

The arch went back a long way, curved brick, warm with a cast-iron stove at the far end.

There was a cutting table as long as a bus and six stitching benches in a row.

Racks of bare wooden trunk frames climbed the walls.

It smelled of leather and wax and coal.

At the nearest bench sat the smallest woman I'd ever seen, with short white hair and half-moon glasses.

She had a needle pinned to the collar of her green cardigan and a thimble on her right hand.

"Peggy Haddon," she said. "His gran. You're taller than your photo."

"You have my photo?"

"It came with the email. Sit." She pointed at a stool with her chin. "Milk? Sugar?"

"Just milk. Thank you."

She poured tea from a brown pot into a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST GRANDSON.

Oliver made a noise behind me.

"That's my mug."

"It's her mug now. Get your own." Peggy put the tea in my hands. "Now. Can you sew?"

"I design bags. I can sew a seam."

"Machine?"

"Mostly."

She sniffed.

She took a leather handle off a hook, two thick strips already punched with holes, and laid it across my knees.

Then she unpinned the needle from her own collar, threaded it with waxed linen, and held it out.

"Saddle stitch. Two needles, one thread, both ways through every hole. Go on."

"Gran," Oliver said. "She's here to close us."

"Then she can close us after she's done a handle."

I put the tea down.

The first stitch took me a full minute.

The second took less.

Peggy watched with her arms folded and didn't say a word until I'd done twelve holes.

Then she leaned over and pulled the thread tight with one hard tug.

"Too loose. Again."

I did it again.

Oliver stood by the stove with his arms folded too, exactly like her.

Around the fourth train I stopped noticing them.

When I looked up, the handle was done, and it was crooked, and it was mine.

Peggy held it up to the light from the doors.

"Terrible," she said. "Not bad for a first. You've got patient hands."

"I'm not going to sign it," I said.

The arch went quiet.

Even the stove seemed to stop ticking.

"The certificate," I said. "Whatever he sent me here to sign. I'm not signing it."

Oliver laughed, short and ugly.

"He sends a vice president across an ocean to not do the one thing he sent her for."

"He sent me across an ocean so I'd be out of the way while he got married."

I hadn't meant to say it.

It came out flat.

Peggy looked at me over her glasses for a long moment.

Oliver didn't say anything at all.

"Where are you staying?" Peggy asked.

"The company booked a hotel near London Bridge."

"Cancel it. I've a back bedroom three doors up. No rent."

"I can't take a room for nothing."

"You'll do the washing-up," she said. "Every night. That's not nothing."

Oliver pushed off the stove.

"Gran. You don't know her."

"I know her hands," Peggy said. "That's more than I knew about the last one."

He walked to the glass office at the back and came out with a fat document in a black clip.

He dropped it on the cutting table in front of me.

The tools jumped.

"That's the sale," he said. "Us to Garland. Two years ago."

He flipped it open to a page marked with a strip of red leather and put one scarred finger on it.

"Clause nine. Read it, then tell me you won't sign."

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