Page 70 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

She’d sent him one line that afternoon and nothing after it. Come to the back. He always used the front, where the bell announced him like a guest she was glad to see. The front was for friends. The back was where the flour came in, and the linen service, and the men with clipboards, and every delivery. Tonight he could arrive the way bad news always had.

He’d asked her once to trust him. She had. She wanted him to stand in the doorway and look her in the eye.

Footsteps came down the alley at twenty past eight. Lucy stood, picked up the folder, and hugged it to her chest.

Chapter 22

KNOX

Knox rehearsed the confession on the walk from the subway.

The first version was too clinical. Eight years ago, Oath Capital acquired a building in Queens. The portfolio restructuring included terminating commercial leases. Golden Lotus was one of them. He sounded like a deposition. Lucy would throw a rolling pin at his head, and she’d be right.

The second version was too emotional. I destroyed your family. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He sounded like a man performing remorse. Lucy would see through it in half a second.

The third version was closer. I found out on Friday. I should have told you immediately. I didn’t. I’m telling you now.

By the tenth version, he’d stripped it down to facts. By the fifteenth, he’d added back the apology, not at the beginning, where it would sound like an excuse, but at the end, where it would land like the truth it was.

By the seventeenth, he’d stopped rehearsing. There were no perfect words. There was only the truth, delivered as cleanly as he could manage, and then whatever came after.

He turned onto her block. The bakery was dark. The CLOSED sign hung in the window, hand-lettered in Lucy’s handwriting, and he’d seen that sign a hundred times and never noticed that the C was slightly crooked, tilted two degrees to the right, a tiny imperfection in an otherwise precise design. Lucy had never fixed it. She valued character over symmetry.

He walked around to the back door, because she’d asked him to. Come to the back, her only message all day.

A security light hummed above the door, throwing a flat yellow glare over everything, and a single moth circled the bulb, determined and useless.

He raised his hand to knock.

The door opened before his knuckles met the wood.

Lucy stood in the doorway.

She was wearing an apron over her jeans, her hair pulled back tight, nothing about her softened for company, and her expression giving away even less.

She’d been crying, and not long ago. The skin beneath her lashes was swollen. She was holding a manila folder against her chest like a shield. He didn’t need to see what was inside. The look on her face told him everything.

“Lucy,” he said.

“Did you know?”

She gave him three words and nothing more.

“Did you know,” she asked again, and her voice was steady and her eyes were wrecked, “that Oath Capital had bought the Golden Lotus building?”

Knox looked at the folder. At her hands. At the dusting of flour on her. She’d been working. Of course she had. Lucy worked when she was scared.

“Yes,” he said. “I found out on Friday.”

Her posture didn’t change. The only thing that moved was her breathing, which stopped, then resumed, the resumption costing her something visible. Her knuckles went white around the folder. “Friday.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t come on Friday.”

“No.”

“You didn’t call.”