The Billionaire Heir Called Me a Freeloader, I'd Bankrolled His Family for 600 Years novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Black, Strong, a Spoon of Honey
I took the freight elevator down, because the passenger lobby belonged to Camille.
The night guard at the service desk was finishing a double shift.
He was a heavy man near sixty, with reading glasses pushed up into his gray hair.
I had walked past his desk for nineteen years and never learned his name.
"Ms. Clifford," he said. "I heard what happened. I'm sorry."
"I need to ask you about the gardener's mother."
His face changed.
"She cleaned this lobby at night for eleven years," I said. "Gray uniform. You would have known her."
"Everyone on nights knew her. Everyone knew Rowan was her boy, too. He came by every Sunday to carry her bucket down." He took off his glasses. "She hummed. Badly. You could hear her from the loading dock."
"What else?"
"At two every morning she left a cup of tea on this desk for me. Black, strong, a spoon of honey, a paper lid so it stayed hot. Eleven years, and she never missed a night."
I thought of the cup outside my garden door.
Black, strong, a spoon of honey.
I had drunk her recipe every morning for four years.
I did not say that out loud.
"When she got sick, the hospital kept sending bills here," the guard said. "Then a collections man came in his own car and asked for her by name. I told him she was gone."
He opened the bottom drawer and took out a bundle of envelopes tied with a rubber band.
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