Chapter 12: Lemon Grove

He walked away before I could answer.

He didn't look back.

I stood there with a bag of blood oranges and the whole market watching me.

Dario's driver came and took the bag out of my hand.

"The car is this way, signorina," he said gently.

I didn't eat dinner that night.

I sat at my old desk upstairs with my laptop open.

I pulled up the list of drivers.

I knew some of them by name.

The man in Ohio who sent me a Christmas card every year because Lodestar had cut his nights on the road in half.

The woman in Georgia who drove with her husband in shifts and had twins at home.

I could shut the license clause off. It would take four lines.

I typed the first one.

Then I sat there and looked at it.

If I turned it back on, Brent kept everything. The company, the girl, the story that I was a thief.

If I didn't, a man in Ohio missed his mortgage.

Someone knocked on my open door.

Dario stood in the hall in his shirtsleeves.

He had never come upstairs before.

"Your father's housekeeper told me you didn't come down," he said. "She sent this."

He had a plate of bread and cheese and olives.

He set it on the corner of my desk and didn't come further into the room.

"You heard what he said to me," I said. "At the market."

"My driver told me."

"Is he right?"

Dario looked at the screen. At the one line I'd typed.

"Walk with me," he said.

We went down the back stairs and out through the kitchen into the lemon grove.

The moon was almost full.

The trees ran down the hill in rows, heavy with fruit, and the air smelled so sweet it made my head ache.

I had played hide and seek here with the gardener's kids.

My mother used to walk here after dinner.

"How much money did Stratton Freight make last year?" Dario said.

"About four hundred million, after costs."

"And how much did Brent take home?"

"Forty million, and stock."

"And the drivers?"

"They're contractors. They get paid by the route."

"So when the routes stop, whose job is it to pay them?"

I didn't answer.

"The man who owns the company," Dario said, "can pay four thousand drivers out of his own pocket for a year. He'd still have enough for a boat."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Billionaire Ex Regrets Throwing Me to the Mafia Don from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.