Page 76 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

“You can and you will.” She folded the keys into Lucy’s hand. “The rent is fair, not below market. The owner owes me a favor older than you are, and I called it in. You’re past the point of needing charity. You need a fair deal and a fresh start, and now you have both. The apartment is separate. You’ll manage it.”

The keys were cold against her palm. Her eyes stung.

“The building is sold, Lucy. The bakery is not. The bakery has never been the building. The bakery is the woman who’s in at five and remembers that Mr. Petrov takes black coffee and pays in exact change.”

“He considers tipping an American extravagance.”

“He’s not wrong.” Mrs. Hadley straightened her cardigan. “Come see the space this afternoon. Bring Marco. Bring your measuring tape and your standards. Don’t bring your grief. The grief will be there when you get back. The space won’t wait.”

She turned and walked to her dry cleaner and began sweeping the sidewalk, steady and methodical and unshakable. She had been solving problems on this block since before Lucy was born, and she intended to keep solving them three blocks west.

Lucy had lost a building and a man in the same week and gained a fair deal and a community that refused to let her fall.

She closed the door to the bakery and looked at Marco. She held up the keys. “We’re going to look at a space.”

Marco stood and brushed the crumbs of a donut from his apron. “Now?”

“This afternoon. After I sit on this floor a little longer.”

“Take your time.” He sat back down beside her and picked up his coffee. “The floor isn’t going anywhere. Neither am I.”

Somewhere in Manhattan, Knox Knightly was sitting alone with his signature and his silence and the ruins of a confession that arrived too late. And somewhere inside Lucy, beneath the betrayal and the grief, was the pain of having been held by hands that had once signed away her family’s restaurant. But there was more. A question was forming. Could she love a man who had caused so much damage but was willing to stand in the wreckage and be accountable for it?

She didn’t have the answer. Today she had the floor and the coffee and Marco and a set of keys to a place she’d never seen.

The new space smelled like other people’s paint and old floor wax. Lucy stood in the center of it with a measuring tape and a cup of coffee.

The floor was original. Mrs. Hadley had been right about that. A floor that creaked when you walked across it, that held other people’s years in its grain. The front windows faced west, which was better than she’d expected. Afternoon light would be extraordinary here, the low September sun cutting straight across the prep counter if she positioned it correctly.

She stretched the measuring tape from the north wall to the south. Twenty-two feet. She wrote it in her notebook, then walked to the back of the space. There was nothing but a locked door to a storage closet and a ceiling that belonged to the apartment above. Her apartment wasn’t here. She had thirty days in her apartment. She’d have to find somewhere new before then.

Her phone was in her pocket. She hadn’t checked it in two hours, which was a personal record for this week. Knox had called that morning. She’d let it ring. He’d left a voicemail, a few sentences, and she’d played it several times.

I know, he’d said. I know what it cost you. I’m not asking you to forgive me today.

She stretched the tape east to west. Eighteen feet two inches. The measuring tape had been her mother’s, yellow plastic, the case cracked along the bottom edge from the time it had fallen off a counter in the old Roosevelt Avenue kitchen. Lucy had been twelve. She remembered her mother in Golden Lotus’s kitchen. Mei-Lin at the line, moving with pure economy, never stopping, because stopping wasn’t something she could afford to be seen doing.

Her mother had poured everything into Golden Lotus, thirty years of it. Her father’s dream had run on her mother’s heartbeat. And when they lost the restaurant years ago, she had fallen apart, badly.

Lucy had been adult enough to watch her mother fall apart and young enough to remember it the wrong way.

Don’t love like that, Lucy had concluded at twenty-two. Don’t love anything you can’t afford to lose.

Squaring her shoulders, she measured the depth of the back room. Eleven feet, good for a walk-in, tight but manageable.

The problem, and Lucy was honest enough to name it now, alone in an empty space with a cold cup of coffee and her mother’s measuring tape, was that she’d gotten the lesson wrong.

Mei-Lin had fallen apart. That part was accurate. The grief had run six months deep, deep enough that Lucy had spent that winter sleeping on her parents’ couch, making sure her mother ate.

She had watched her mother go under. She hadn’t watched what came after.

What came after was her mother got up. She hadn’t gotten up quickly, or gracefully. But Mei-Lin Wang, who had loved her restaurant and lost it, had eventually started cooking at home again. She’d shown Lucy how to fold dumplings the same way her own mother had taught her. She’d handed Lucy the yellow measuring tape that still worked, the day Lucy signed the lease on Flour & Honey.

Lucy sat down on the floor. The old boards creaked under her. The cold coffee was genuinely terrible.

Her mother hadn’t taught her don’t love like that. Her mother had survived losing like that. The lesson wasn’t don’t. The lesson was, you can, and you will still stand.

She’d spent years running from a mistake her mother never made.