16. Delilah #2
I look at the letter on my counter with my blood on the corner of the last page. In sixteen days, everything I’ve ever loved is gone.
I’m beaten. There’s no version of this where I’m not.
“Alright,” I say. “You win. Tell me where you want me and what I’m signing. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me get my mixers out before whatever happens next. Some of them are on payment plans.”
Kane doesn’t say anything. He just stares at me as a strange kind of storm rages behind those green eyes.
“Stop dragging it out,” I snap. “You won, okay? I concede. All hail the victor. Now, can I just sign whatever stupid paper confirms all this?”
I reach for the pen cup in the corner, but as I do, I accidentally knock my father’s planner over the edge. It flops on the floor at Kane’s feet.
Kane crouches down and picks it up before I can run around the counter and beat him to it. I hold out a hand, but he doesn’t give it back.
Instead, he flips it open and starts to peruse.
“Give me that,” I order.
He makes no move to do so. “What is this?”
“It’s a calendar. My dad’s. Give it back.”
He doesn’t. He flips a page. Then another. And I know what he’s looking at, because it’s kinda hard to miss it.
X. X. X. X.
“Explain it,” he says.
I could tell him to go to hell. It wouldn’t be the first time tonight. He definitely deserves it.
Instead, I hear myself start talking, and then I can’t get the brakes on.
“My lawyer wanted me to comb through all our bank statements for proof of infidelity and misuse of joint marital funds. So I’ve been sitting in that stupid office since Tuesday with a highlighter, going line by line, looking for hotels and dinners and anything that shouldn’t be there. I thought…”
When I trail off, he prods me. “You thought what?”
I take a shuddering breath. My throat feels tight and achy.
“I thought the affair was just over a year old. But there’s a Marriott charge from twenty-six months ago.
And then there’s one before that. And another before that one.
” I take the planner out of his hands, finally, and he lets me.
“It’s not fourteen months—it’s years. I don’t even know how many yet, because I ran out of paperwork before I ran out of knives in the back. ”
Kane watches me and waits.
“So I got a pen,” I say, “and I started marking the dates where it seemed plausible that they were together. And every single one of them is a day I remember. Family holidays, mostly.” I flip it open and turn it toward him and point.
“Easter. I ran the egg hunt in the backyard for my cousin’s kids, and he came out of the house with his hair messed up and said he’d been helping my mother in the basement.
Fourth of July, him and Vivian went out for ‘ice.’ Thanksgiving, he stayed home to finish up work stuff. ”
“February seventh,” Kane says, tapping that date with one tattooed finger. I’m not surprised that he remembers. He heard me rehearse it in a pantry. He saw the slideshow. He knows what it means.
“That one I already knew about. It can’t hurt me any more than it already did.
” I close the planner. “It’s the others.
Those were good days. If you’d asked me in November to name the best days I had, I’d have named half of the ones that have X’s on them now.
And because of what they did to them, they’re gone.
Not just the day, but the whole memory of it.
It’s tainted. I can’t get at any of them anymore without them standing in it. ”
My eyes are stinging, so I look at the register drawer.
“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s a calendar. Just a bunch of stupid holidays. Whatever.”
Kane doesn’t move for a long moment.
Then he says, “No.”
“No what?”
“That isn’t right.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrug. “Take it up with them.”
“I intend to.” He takes one step back from the counter. His face has changed. Not softer. If anything he looks angrier than he did when he was talking about buying my husband’s testimony. But I feel oddly protected from it.
His rage and violence isn’t aimed at me anymore.
“They took your holidays from you. They did it in your house, around your family, on the days you did the work. And now, you sit here and tell me it’s fine? Where’s your fucking rage?”
“What do you want me to do, cry in front of a mob boss?”
“I want the record corrected.” He scowls at the planner in my hands. “It can’t stand like that. I won’t let it.”
“That’s a nice sentiment, but time only runs one direction, so—”
“Then we don’t fix the old ones,” he declares. “We put new ones on top.”
I stop. “What?”
“I’m making you a new offer.” He reaches out to grab my hands in his and pull me toward him. The counter is between us, but Kane’s grip is tight and unrelenting. “Every holiday between New Year’s Eve and Easter, you spend with me.”
I laugh right in his face. “I’m sorry, what?”
“New Year’s Eve, whatever comes after it, Valentine’s Day.
All of them, right through Easter Sunday.
” He nods at the planner. “They stole those days in your book. I want them back. So we’ll take them, one at a time, and by the end of it, when you look at that page, you won’t see them anymore. You’ll see me instead.”
I blink a few times, but the mirage that is Kane Makov doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Maybe he’s real after all.
“You’re out of your mind.”
“You’re not the first person to tell me that.”
“And what do you get?” I question. “Because you’re not a charity. You’ve made that extremely clear.”
“I get what I want,” he says, “which is my business to know, not yours.”
“That’s not—”
“And you get this.” He picks up the four stapled pages off my counter, the ones with my blood dried brown on the corner, and he holds them up between two fingers.
“Come Easter Sunday, if you’ve kept your end, I’ll burn it.
The note, the pledge, the guaranty with your husband’s handwriting on it—all of it, in front of you.
It’ll be yours. And nobody will ever come for this building again. ”
I look at the note in his hand. Then at the planner in mine. Lose everything in sixteen days, but keep my dignity? Or submit to Kane Makov and retain the bakery that’s been my life’s dream?
I want to say yes right now, before he changes his mind. My mouth is already open to do it.
That’s why I don’t.
“I need a day,” I say.
Kane sets the pages down on the counter. “Alright. Take it.”
“That’s it? No ‘you have until midnight,’ no—I don’t know—ominous countdown?”
“One day,” he agrees. “Call the same number when you’ve decided. If the answer is no, then I’ll see you again on January 15th, under less accommodating terms.”
He pulls his gloves out of his pocket and tugs them back on. At the door, he stops.
“A man will be here tomorrow morning about the lock,” he says. “Let him in. He’s not coming to bother you.”
Then he goes. The bell over my broken door rattles in the cold. The two coats on the sidewalk peel off after him, until the entire black-clad trio disappears into the winter gloom.
I stand there in the dark with the pendant bulb over my head and the bloodstained note lying on the counter where he left it. I don’t have any idea what just happened.
Then I open the planner and find Easter.
I look at the X on it for a long, long time.
Three months spending holidays with a mob boss. That’s not so bad, right?