6. Ivy
— ? —
Ivy
He shows up at four thirty, right when I’m flipping the CLOSED sign.
I see his car pull up through the window. Watch him get out, straighten his jacket, square his shoulders like he’s preparing for a board meeting. The audacity of this man, thinking he can just show up during business hours and demand my attention.
I turn the lock with a decisive click and pull down the door shutter.
He rings the doorbell.
I don’t even look up. Just keep wiping down the counter, moving chairs onto tables, doing my closing routine like he’s not standing six feet away.
He knocks. Three sharp raps against the glass door.
“Ivy.” His voice is muffled through the glass. “Please. We need to talk.”
I spray cleaner on the display case. Wipe in slow, deliberate circles.
“I’m not leaving.” Louder now. “I’ll stand here all night if I have to.”
Good luck with that. It’s forecasted to rain and I’ve yet to schedule a guy to renovate the porch canopy.
Amelie pokes her head out from the kitchen. “Is that…”
“Ignore him.”
“He’s just standing there.”
“He’s good at that. Standing around while life happens without him.”
She gives me a look but doesn’t push. Smart woman, my sister. She bundles Maddie into her carrier and heads up the stairs to our rooms above the shop. No way I’m parading my daughter past her father while he’s putting on a performance for the whole street.
The knocking continues. Then stops.
I risk a glance at the small gap between the shutter.
He’s still there, hands in his pockets now, staring at the door like he can will it open. The thunder starts, and I feel a petty satisfaction at the timing. Let him stand there and get soaked and understand what it feels like to be shut out.
I finish closing. Turn off the lights in the front. Head to the kitchen to start tomorrow’s prep.
The rain begins around five fifteen.
I hear it first, a soft patter against the windows that builds into a steady drumming. I tell myself I’m not thinking about him out there. I tell myself he probably gave up the second the first drop hit his expensive jacket.
But I don’t check. Because checking would mean caring, and I refuse to care.
Maddie goes down easy at six, exhausted from a busy day of being adored by customers and chewing on wooden spoons. I eat leftover soup standing at the kitchen counter, scrolling through tomorrow’s order list, pretending my mind isn’t wandering to the street below.
By seven, the storm is biblical.
Rain sheeting down so hard I can barely see the streetlights. Thunder cracking overhead like the sky is splitting open. The kind of weather that sends sensible people running for cover, canceling plans, staying home.
I drift toward the front of the bakery without meaning to. Just to check that everything’s secure. Just to make sure the storm hasn’t damaged anything and the rain isn’t entering the front door.
Fortunately, everything’s intact, the porch is all wet, but no one’s there.
The floor-to-ceiling windows face the street, and through the blur of rain, I can see the sidewalk, the empty parking spaces, the awning of the hardware store across the way.
And Kurt.
Still there.
He’s not even standing under the awning.
He’s just out in it, in the middle of the sidewalk, rain plastering his hair to his forehead, his jacket soaked through so completely it looks black instead of gray.
His head is bowed, eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, shoulders hunched against the downpour.
He looks like a man doing penance.
I stand in my dark bakery and watch my husband drown, and I feel every wall I’ve built start to shake.
He’s putting on a show because he knows I’m watching, knows I can’t resist a dramatic gesture. But he’s been out there for three hours.
Three hours in the rain, not knocking anymore, not demanding, just waiting. It feels as though he’d stay there forever, a man with nowhere else to go and nothing more important than occupying this sidewalk until I decide his penance is up.
I hate him for making me feel this.
The lock clicks open and the door swings wide. Rain immediately spatters across my threshold.
“Get in here before you catch pneumonia. I’m not explaining to Maddie why her father died of stupidity.”
His head snaps up. Water runs down his face, dripping off his jaw, and his eyes find mine with an intensity that makes my chest hurt.
He walks through the door on legs that move stiffly, like he’s been standing so long his body forgot how to work.
I lock the door behind him and flip on the lights. Under the fluorescents, he looks worse. Pale beneath his tan, lips almost blue, a fine tremor running through his shoulders.
“Kitchen.” I point. “There are towels in the back.”
He follows me without argument.
I throw him a stack of clean dish towels, the ones I use for bread proofing, and busy myself making coffee I don’t want. Behind me, I hear the rough sound of him drying his hair, his face, his hands.
“Why are you here, Kurt?”
“You wouldn’t open the door.”
“So you decided to stand in a hurricane?”
“I decided to wait.” The towel drops onto the counter. “However long it took.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
I turn around. He’s standing there with his hair sticking up in every direction, his jacket dripping onto my clean floor, looking less like a CEO and more like a stray dog someone left out in the cold.
“You had all day yesterday to say whatever you came to say. You had your ten minutes and you just stared at me and the walls.”
“Ten minutes wasn’t enough.”
“Then you should have talked faster.”
“I should have done a lot of things.” He takes a step toward me, and I hold my ground.
“I should have answered your calls ten years ago. I should have noticed when you stopped making them. I should have been there for every doctor’s appointment and every ultrasound and every moment of her life that I missed because I was too busy being important. ”
“Pretty speech. Did you rehearse it in the rain?”
“I’ve been rehearsing it for two years.” His voice cracks. “Every night since you left. Every morning I woke up alone in that penthouse. I’ve been writing speeches and throwing them away because none of them are good enough. None of them undo what I did.”
“Then why give them?”
“Because I don’t know what else to do.” He spreads his hands, helpless in a way I’ve never seen from him.
“I don’t know how to fix this, Ivy. I don’t have a strategy.
I don’t have a plan. I just have the fact that my daughter looked at me like I was a monster yesterday, and I can’t live with that.
I can’t go back to the city and pretend she doesn’t exist. I can’t spend another year wondering if you’re okay. ”
“We’re fine. We’ve been fine without you.”
“I can see that.” He gestures around the kitchen, at the industrial mixer and the proofing racks and the neat rows of ingredients waiting for tomorrow. “You built all of this. Without me. Without my money or my name or anything I could have given you. You did it yourself.”
“Was I supposed to wait around for you to notice I was gone?”
“No. You were supposed to tell me you were pregnant.”
The words land like a slap.
“Excuse me?”
“You were supposed to give me a chance.” He’s not yelling, but his voice has an edge now, grief sharpened into accusation.
“One phone call, Ivy. One text. One email. Anything to let me know I had a daughter on the way. Instead, you disappeared. You hid. You let me spend two years thinking I’d lost everything when the truth was so much bigger. ”
“You want to talk about what I was supposed to do?” I step closer, my own voice rising.
“I was supposed to trust a man who couldn’t remember our anniversary without a calendar invite.
I was supposed to believe that a man who let his assistant pick out my birthday present would suddenly become father of the year.
I was supposed to call the office line and hope that this time, this one time, someone would actually pass along the message. ”
His face changes. “What?”
“I called you, Kurt. Eight days after I left. I picked up the phone and I called your office because I couldn’t stomach dialing the cell number I’d seen in those texts.”
“I never got that call.”
“Because Millie answered.” I let the name hang there, watching it land. “She said she’d pass along the message. She didn’t.”
“Millie.” He breathes the name like a curse.
“Your loyal assistant. Your indispensable right hand. The woman who knew about your father’s diagnosis before your wife did.
” I’m shaking now, anger and old hurt rising up from wherever I buried them.
“She answered your phone, and she heard me crying, and she told me she’d make sure you called back.
Three days I waited. Three days of jumping every time my phone buzzed. And nothing.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t. You never knew anything unless she told you.
That’s how I confirmed that Millie did plan to drive me out of your life.
” I laugh, and it comes out bitter. “I used to wonder how she had time to be so involved in your life. Then I realized you’d given her the time by taking it from me. ”
He sags against the counter like his legs won’t hold him anymore.
“I fired her.”
“When?”
“The day I finally stopped making excuses for those texts.”
“And yet she’s still showing up. Still tracking me down. Still calling you with intelligence reports about your ex-wife’s bakery and your secret daughter.” I cross my arms. “Why is that, Kurt? Why is the woman you fired still so invested in your life?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is hollow.
“Because she thought I’d come here and destroy you.
That’s why she called. She gave me the address and she told me about Maddie and she waited for me to show up with lawyers and demands and righteous fury.
She wanted me to burn this down. She wanted me to prove that I’m still the man she could control. ”
“And are you?”