Page 246 of Sweet Ruin

Josef is standing guard outside the bakery’s back door when I arrive.

“She’s inside,” he explains as I storm up. “She asked me to stay out.”

“Then I suggest you do as she said.”

I, however, am not smart enough to follow suit.

Instead, I stride up to the door and pound on it with my fist.

For a while, nothing happens. Then Lilah appears behind the glass. She’s still wearing her coat. Her keys are in her hand, thrusting out from between her knuckles like claws. Her face is murky, but I can still see tears and anger warring in her eyes.

She looks at me before unlocking the door.

“I want answers,” she says. “That’s why I’m letting you in. The only reason. Copy that?”

“Loud and clear.”

She steps back. I enter, and she locks the door behind me.

The ovens are off. A few covered racks stand beside the worktable. She takes off her coat and hangs it on a hook, then walks to the counter separating the kitchen from the front. Very carefully and intentionally, she positions herself on one side of it and points for me to stay on the other.

We look around in awkward silence for a minute. There are so many things I want to say that they’re all crowding each other out in my throat, refusing to be left behind.

In the end, she speaks first.

“I keep coming here,” she whispers. “Every time. This is where I go, because it’s mine.”

She drags her fingertip through a tiny pile of spilled sugar on the counter.

“My dad offered me money to help buy this place. Did I ever tell you that? He was sick already. He wrote me a check at his kitchen table and I gave it back to him.” She laughs, eyes blurry with the memory. “He thought I was being proud. I wasn’t. I just knew what would happen. Vivian would want it eventually, and my mother would find a way to explain to me why she should have it, and I’d hand it over, because that’s what I do. What I’ve always done.”

I say nothing. Just stand there in silent anguish and let her pour her broken heart out to me in bleeding little pieces.

“So I saved. It was hard. I worked doubles at a place in Bay Ridge where the owner called me sweetheart and shorted my hours when I told him not to touch my ass every time I had to squeeze by him in the kitchen. I lived in a studio next to a railroad with a radiator that banged all night. I ate ramen three meals a day and wore shoes with holes in them in the dead of winter. And then, eventually, I bought this.” She looks up at the ceiling, at the ductwork, at the light above the case. Her face softens with pure love. “Twenty-four hundred square feet of nothing special. The floor’s uneven. The compressor’s dying. But the deed says Delilah A. Dorsey, goddammit.”

Her throat moves as she swallows.

“This is the only thing I’ve ever had where nobody could come along and say, Well, actually, we gave you that, so we’re taking it back. Not my mother. Not my sister. Not my husband. Nobody.”

She wipes her face with the back of her wrist.

“It’s the only thing in my life that was ever mine.”

Finally, I can’t bear it anymore. “Lilah⁠—”

“No.” She holds up a hand. “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say that isn’t an answer to my questions. I just want some information, and then you’re going to leave me alone, okay?”

It kills me, but I nod.

“Did you spend years buying the properties around me?”

“Yes.”

“And mine is the last one you needed? The final white square on that map of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Did you look into Connor’s finances before you approached him? His debts, his gambling?”