17. Delilah
DELILAH
The nice lady on Facebook Marketplace who sold me this cot is a filthy liar. It is not comfortable enough to sleep on for the rest of my life. Not by a long shot.
So it goes without saying that I don’t sleep much on Wednesday night.
I guess I should go a little bit easier on that lady, because I have had some good naps here.
But there’s a big, big difference between a twenty-minute I’m so tired I could fall asleep anywhere snooze with your mouth wide open and an eight-hour session of tossing and turning and replaying every mistake you’ve ever made.
“Ever saying a single word to Kane Makov” is currently at the top of the list.
I’m not even sure why I asked for a day, because one measly little twenty-four-hour window is not nearly enough to wrap my head around the enormity of his offer.
A day to decide the fate of my bakery.
A day to decide the fate of my life, really.
Because one thing is clear: Stepping into Kane’s world is a one-way ticket. There’s no world in which I return to my little old life, intact and unchanged.
Even the way he grabbed my hands over the counter has left an impression on me. That touch, those eyes… He carves off a tiny piece of me every time and keep it for himself.
A day to decide if I can spend three months with that?
Yeah, right.
It’s not even close to enough.
At quarter past four, I quit pretending I’m ever going to sleep and get up.
I brush my teeth and wash my face in the little bathroom attached to the back office.
I’m out in the kitchen by twenty after, which is early even for me.
In the bakery business, New Year’s Eve is a day that eats you alive if you let it.
We’ve got special orders out the wazoo, plus the regular case, and all the other endless chores that come with running a place like this. It’s going to be a very long shift.
But when I get out, the kitchen lights are already on.
Huh?
I brace myself to find a certain 6’4”, green-eyed mob boss looming over my pastries.
But to my surprise, I get a 5’3” Indian woman with waist-length black hair tied back in a flawless fishtail braid instead.
Priya doesn’t hear me at first. That’s probably because she’s humming along to the Christmas music that’s coming from the radio on the high shelf.
She’s a sucker for holiday music, that one.
I’ve always joked that if Mariah Carey ever came into the bakery, Priya would leap over the counter trying to kiss her.
She’s easing a tray of croissants onto the rack. When she finishes and turns around, she sees me and smiles.
“Look who’s vertical!” she says. “And conscious! At the same time!”
“I’m only vertical by the good grace of the wall here,” I mumble, “and I’m only conscious by the good grace of anxiety and cortisol.”
“Well, vertical is vertical, and conscious is conscious,” she replies with a wise wink. “We’ve all gotta start the day somewhere.” She turns and starts bustling over to her next task. “Although you, my glazed little honey bun, do not need to be starting the day quite yet. Why are you awake?”
“Why are you awake?” I counter. “You’re not on ‘til six.”
“Because it’s New Year’s Eve and I have fourteen cake orders, nine dozen cupcake trays, and a boss who thinks she’s a rotisserie chicken who never needs turning.” She hands me a coffee, then wags a stern finger in my face. “Don’t speak again until you’ve had half of this.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I mutter. I lean against the corner of the steel table in yesterday’s leggings and follow Priya’s orders, while Bing Crosby promises somebody a white Christmas six days too late.
Priya goes back to the rack.
I watch her work, her braid swishing back and forth beneath her jade-green silk headband. As the coffee hits my bloodstream, I realize with a jolt that it’s a blessing in disguise that she’s here.
The inside of my head is a wreck right now. Between Connor, Vivian, my mother, and Kane, I’ve got all kinds of ghosts and phantoms screaming at me from between my own ears.
What I need is an outlet. Someone non-judgmental, who will hear me out and help me through this swamp of bad thoughts.
I don’t really have many options. It’s not like I would ever have gone to any of my family members with this kind of stuff.
Even before I learned that my husband and sister were running around behind my back, I wasn’t exactly confiding my deepest and darkest fears to either of them.
They just didn’t know how to listen, how to help.
I’ve been on my own for a very long time.
But now that I’ve ruthlessly eviscerated them, I’m even more alone.
No calls are pinging my phone. My aunts have gone quiet in a way that tells me the group chat I’m not in is probably extremely active. There’s Skye, who charges by the tenth of an hour and strikes me more as a cold-blooded automaton than a friendly shoulder to lean on.
Which leaves Priya.
Except…
Tonight will be our little secret, Lilah.
Do I dare defy Kane? He warned me not to tell anyone about him, and I don’t even want to begin imagining what he’d do if I broke that command.
But he didn’t say I couldn’t talk about the situation. If I keep things vague, that should be fine, right?
One thing’s obvious: If I keep things inside my head, I’m liable to explode. I have to vent something or Priya will end up scrubbing little bits of me off the walls and ceilings when I inevitably erupt like Mount St. Helens.
“Hey, Pri.”
“Mm?”
“Can I ask you something dumb?”
“Those are the only kinds of questions you ever ask me!” she teases.
I lob a stale bread roll at her head. She ducks it, giggling, then turns around, props herself against the counter, and crosses her arms in the classic Priyanka Osborne way. It always makes me feel like I’ve been sent in for a scolding from the world’s kindest elementary school principal.
“I’m kidding,” she says, just in case I’d forgotten she’s the nicest person alive. “I’m always here for you, sweet cakes. Lay it on me. What’s up?”
I take a deep breath.
Okay. Here we go.
“There’s a… situation. With the building,” I say.
“What kind of situation?”
“Connor did… a thing.” I start to nervously peel at some flaking paint on the rim of the coffee cup. “He borrowed money. A lot of it. And he put up the bakery as collateral if he doesn’t pay it back.”
Priya’s arms come uncrossed and her jaw comes unhinged. “He used—Delilah. He put up this? The building? Your building?”
“I didn’t let him, just to be clear,” I hurry to clarify. “He forged my name to do it. I’ve got a lawyer and she says he can’t legally do what he did.”
Pri exhales and eases back. “Whew, okay. Well, that’s good. I mean, court’s no fun, but at least— Oh. Oh, no. I don’t like that look on your face at all, hon.”
I wince. “She also says proving it runs two hundred grand and takes a year, and I have neither.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my God.” She starts to crack her knuckles, one of her anxious habits. “When did you find this out?”
“Christmas Eve.” I hear how that sounds. “Well. Some of it came before that.”
“You’ve been sitting on this since Christmas Eve?”
“I’ve been sitting on a lot of things since Christmas Eve. It’s been a full week.”
“Okay, well, keep going, tell me everything! What happens now?”
This is where it gets tricky.
“The… lender… came to see me,” I say evasively.
She frowns, eyebrows coming together. “Like, someone from the bank?”
I shake my head. “Not a bank.”
“Then who?”
“It’s a—how do I say this?—a non-traditional lender.”
“Uh… okay…” Thankfully, she doesn’t pry further on that point quite yet. “I’ll spare you the inquisition for now. Go on.”
“He offered me an arrangement,” I say. “If I do what he wants for the next few months, he’ll forgo the collateral and the building will stay mine. If I don’t, he takes it on the 15th of January.”
The V in her eyebrows points more downward. “Well, what does he want?”
And there it is. The hardest part of this whole really hard conversation.
“I can’t tell you that.”
At that, Priya’s eyebrows fly straight up.
“I’m not being cute,” I add. “Part of it is I’m not allowed to say. That’s a condition. I’d tell you if I could.”
“Delilah.”
“I know.”
“De. Li. Lah. Girl. Woman. Lady. C’mon.”
“I know, Pri.” I set the cup down. My hands are dying for something to do, so I drag the bin of sanding sugar over and start setting up for cookies I don’t need to prep for another hour. “It’s a few months of a commitment and it ends at Easter. That’s the most I can give you.”
Pri watches me fiddle with things for a while, lips pursed. Then she asks:
“Is this person going to hurt you?”
I stop.
I did not expect that to be the question. I expected Is it illegal, or Have you lost your mind, or What would your father say?
But Priya has always had a gift for getting straight to the heart of things.
I think about it. It takes me a while, but in my defense, there’s a lot to sort through.
A coat settling over my shoulders. Heavy, warm, and fragrant.
The phone in his palm, extended in my direction. Be my guest. Call anyone you want.
Green eyes in the pantry. A huge shadow in the dark.
Do you think I don’t know what’s standing in front of me?
And then I think about the melted guts of my deadbolt in his glove, and the two men on my sidewalk with their backs to my window, and a shaking old man named Sasha bowing in a doorway, and a crowbar swinging at an exposed kneecap.
All of those things are the same man. I get that.
And yet…
“No,” I tell her softly. “No, I don’t think he is.”
Priya studies my face for a long moment. “Are you sure?”
“I think so.” I straighten the last jar. “Which probably makes me an idiot. But you asked, and that’s my final answer.”
“You’re not an idiot. You’re the least idiotic person I know, which is a big part of why I’m scared right now.” She pushes off the counter and comes down the table toward me. “Does he have kids?”
“What? No. Why would you—? I mean, I don’t think so.”
“I don’t know! I’m trying to picture him.” She flaps a hand. “What did your lawyer say about it?”
“I haven’t told my lawyer.”
“Why the hell not?”