The Wife He Never Knew I Became novel · Chapter 6 of 32
Chapter 6: Five A.M.
The wholesale flower market opened at five, in a cold concrete hall near the airport that smelled like wet stems and diesel.
I'd been buying there on Tuesdays for two and a half years.
I was pushing my cart down the tulip aisle in a wool hat when somebody held a paper cup out in front of me.
"Oat milk latte," Daniel said. "Extra hot. You still drink them like lava?"
He looked like he hadn't slept. He was wearing the same black coat from the cemetery.
"How did you know I'd be here?"
"You told me once. Tuesdays, five a.m., when the good ranunculus come in." He kept holding out the cup. "I remember everything you ever told me, Lena."
"Then you remember I said I never wanted to see you again."
"That one I'm choosing to forget."
I didn't take the coffee.
I picked up a bucket of white ranunculus and checked the stems.
He set the cup down on the edge of my cart and walked beside me.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "Nobody else knows."
"Then don't tell me."
"We have fifty-two days." He said it fast, like pulling a splinter. "The lenders want two hundred and ten million by the end of May, or they take the tower. They take everything. My mother put her house up as security. The Shaughnessy house."
I stopped walking.
I had lived in the coach house of that house for two years. I had planted the climbing roses on its garden wall.
"There are three hundred people who paid deposits," Daniel said. "Teachers. Retired couples. If we go down, they go down."
"Then you should be talking to Mr. Rutherford."
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