My Fiancé's Baby Isn't Mine, So Neither Is My Fortune novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Leak

I did not wait for tomorrow.

At seven the next morning I took the train down alone and went to the first place Heidi ever lived in New York.

It was a five-story brick building in Astoria, with a laundromat on the ground floor.

I had helped her carry boxes up those stairs the summer after college.

The building manager was a heavy man in a stained undershirt, drinking coffee on the stoop.

"Heidi Lind?" he said. "Yeah, I remember her. Third floor back. Left two years ago."

"She said her ceiling leaked," I said. "That a pipe burst in her apartment and she had to leave."

"When?"

"Two years ago, in the spring."

He gave me a long look and took out his phone.

He scrolled for a while.

"No leak," he said. "Not that spring. Not in the last four years. I'd have a ticket."

"Maybe she didn't file one."

"Lady, I fix every pipe in this building myself. A leak on the third floor comes through to the laundromat." He pointed his thumb behind him. "Nothing came through."

My mouth had gone dry.

"She was on a month-to-month," he went on. "She left because somebody paid out her lease and gave her a month's notice. A man did it. Old guy."

"An old man?"

"Not old. Fifties. Tall, tanned, always had a ball cap down over his eyes, even at night."

He shrugged.

"He came every Sunday for three years and went up with groceries. I figured he was her father."

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