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Teardown started at eleven. The top tier went into its box for the Sterlings’ freezer, the garden emptied by degrees, and Marco loaded the van while Bree counted serving pieces and Lucy broke down the dessert table fast and flat, the way a woman works when she’s outrunning her own thoughts.

Her sister Jane appeared at the loading dock with her heels in her hand. “Great toast,” she said. “I cried, and I was prepared to mock him.”

“You and the whole garden.”

“Listen.” Jane dropped the wedding voice and picked up the other one, the one she used when she’d been awake too long with a database open. “You know the chapter of my thesis I can’t finish, the one about who actually owns the buildings when a family gets pushed out? I’ve been running your building the way I’d run a case for school.”

Lucy’s hands kept stacking boards. “And?”

“Somebody’s buying your building, and the name on the offer is a developer I’d never heard of, which is exactly how it looked with Mom and Dad.” She glanced toward the glasshouse, golden and emptied behind them, and something crossed her face too fast for Lucy to read. “So I’ve been pulling the ownership all week, because these companies hide behind shells and I wasn’t going to scare you with a guess. There’s one record left, and the registry doesn’t open until tomorrow. Priya, my cohort, can get me in first thing, and she owes me roughly a hundred favors.”

“Jane. Tell me what you think.”

“No.” She said it gently, which was somehow worse than anything else that had happened all week. “Not on a guess. You taught me that. I’ll come to the bakery tomorrow, after I know.” She set her heels on the dock, stepped into them, and hugged Lucy hard around the cake boards. “It was a beautiful wedding. Whatever happens after tonight, it was a beautiful wedding.”

She left. Lucy stood in the loading dock, watching the last lights of the glasshouse go out panel by panel.

Tomorrow, Knox had said. Tomorrow, Jane had said. Everything was waiting on a day that hadn’t come yet, and her hands, steady through a hundred roses, had finally started to ache.

She climbed inside the van beside Marco and rode home through the city with the radio off.

Chapter 21

LUCY

The day after a wedding ran on a fixed routine.

The table rentals had gone back at ten. The invoices had gone out at noon. By two, Lucy was at the marble counter shaping Tuesday’s Danish, spooning cherry filling into each folded square, because tonight Knox was coming with his everything and her hands needed somewhere to live until he did.

Then the back door opened without a knock, and Jane stood on the mat in yesterday’s eyeliner, holding a manila folder against her chest with both arms. Jane never held anything with both arms. She carried the world one-handed, backpack slung, phone out, narrating.

“You found the name,” Lucy said.

“Sit down.”

“I don’t sit.”

“Lucy.” Jane’s voice came out level, and the levelness was the worst sound Lucy had heard all year, because Jane didn’t do level. Jane did fast and loud and certain. “Please.”

Lucy wiped the flour from her hands and sat at their usual table by the window, in her own chair, across from the chair that had been his since the first planning meeting. Jane sat in it. She put the folder on the table and kept her palm flat on top of it, as if the contents might try to leave.

“Priya got me into the registry this morning,” Jane said. “The company buying your building is a developer called Hargrove. Three partners, a dozen conversions across Brooklyn, no parent company tucked in behind them, no trick. They’re buying the block because the block got expensive, and that part is exactly what it looks like.”

Lucy had been holding a question since the back door opened. “And Knox?”

“Knox isn’t in it.” Jane’s voice stayed level. “His name is nowhere near the sale. I checked twice, because I thought what you’re thinking, that he’d been hiding behind a shell the whole time, that the silence was him buying the ground out from under you and not being able to say it. It isn’t your building, Lucy. He didn’t lie to you about that.”

Something in Lucy felt relief, but Jane was still wearing the wrong face. “Then why do you look like this?”

“Because your building was never the worst thing I came here to tell you.”

Jane took a breath that shook in the middle. “You know my thesis files. I photographed Mom and Dad’s old papers last spring, the box in the hall closet, everything from the restaurant. Leases, citations, the health inspection Dad framed because he got a hundred. I cataloged it for my displacement chapter, and I never read the legal stack properly, because I was fifteen when it happened.” She set the folder on the table between them. “Last night I read it.”

Lucy opened the folder.

The top page was a form letter on heavy stock, dated eight years ago. The letterhead said Oath Capital. The subject line said Notice of Commercial Lease Termination, 47-12 Roosevelt Avenue. The body was four paragraphs of statutory language, ninety days rendered in serif font, and the addressee was Golden Lotus LLC, attention Ming Wang, proprietor.

The signature at the bottom was small and certain and slanted right.