16. Edda #2
She stood in the doorway in her usual housecoat and slippers, her grandson’s BMX hanging from one hand like it weighed nothing. Her expression hovered somewhere between relief and accusation.
“You’re open,” she said.
“I’m working.” Close enough to true.
“I called three times. Left messages. The boy needs the bike for school.”
I set the wrench down and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I know. I’m sorry. Something came up.”
Mrs. Petrova’s eyes narrowed. She had seen the article. Of course, she had. Everyone had seen it.
“The newspaper says you were pretending,” she said. “With that Thornhill man. Says the whole thing was fake.”
My jaw tightened before I could stop it. I forced a breath in, slow and steady.
“The newspaper says a lot of things.”
“So it’s not true?”
“What’s true,” I said carefully, “is that I did work for his company. Consulting on a heritage project. The invoices are real. The documentation is real. The heritage designation I filed for this building is official and permanent. None of it depends on anything romantic.”
Mrs. Petrova studied me for a long moment.
“And the romantic part?”
I held her gaze. “That’s between him and me.”
She let out a short snort, but her expression eased in a way that didn’t match the sound. “The boy needs the bike by Thursday.”
“I’ll have it ready.”
She set the BMX down near the door and shuffled out without another word. The bell chimed softly behind her as she left.
I stood there for a beat too long, heart thudding harder than it should have been for a conversation that simple.
It wasn’t the article that stuck.
It was the fact that I’d finally answered it out loud.
Not to Bennett. Not to a lawyer. Not even to Lina, who already believed me. To someone who had walked in with an opinion already formed and expected me to fold under it.
And I hadn’t.
No overexplaining. No scrambling to be understood. Just facts, held steady, and then silence.
It should have felt like nothing.
Instead, it landed like something solid under my feet after too long on shifting ground.
Lina arrived at noon with a paper bag of sandwiches and a bottle of prenatal vitamins. She placed them on the counter with deliberate care, the kind that said she had been thinking about me more than she wanted to admit.
“You’re working,” she said.
“I’m working.”
“That’s good.” She unwrapped a sandwich and passed it over. Turkey and Swiss on sourdough. My usual. “Eat something that isn’t crackers.”
I took a bite because it was easier than arguing. The bread was fresh, the turkey decent. My stomach didn’t immediately push back for once.
“Mrs. Petrova came by,” I said between bites.
Lina’s eyebrows lifted. “How’d that go?”
“She asked if the article was true.”
“And you said?”
“I told her the work was real. The rest wasn’t her business.”
Lina’s mouth curved, the first real smile I’d seen in days. “Look at you. Handling it.”
“I’m not handling it. I’m surviving it. There’s a difference.”
“Sure.” She dragged a chair from behind the register and sat, crossing one leg over the other at the ankle. “But surviving still counts. You’ve been holed up in here for almost a week. I was starting to think you’d come out with a manifesto and a conspiracy board.”
“The conspiracy board’s upstairs. I’m still refining the manifesto.”
That got a laugh out of her, short and surprised, and something in my chest eased at the sound.
“I’m keeping it,” I said.
Lina blinked. “Keeping what?”
“The baby.”
Her expression didn’t change the way I expected. No shock, no scramble. Just a steady look, as she’d already walked herself through every possible answer.
“I know,” she said simply.
The certainty in it made my throat tighten in a way I didn’t like.
“I don’t need him for that.”
“I know that too.”
“But I’m going to have to tell him. Eventually.
” I set the sandwich down, my appetite gone just as quickly as it had returned.
“Not because I owe him anything. Because the kid deserves to know who their father is, even if he’s emotionally stunted and thinks every conversation requires a boardroom agenda. ”
Lina studied me for a beat.
“You called him emotionally stunted.”
“He asked me if I’d considered my options. Like I was a contractor delivering a problem.”
“I know. You told me. And you’re right, that was awful.” Lina leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “But you also told me about the ladder. And the coffee. And the medal he showed you that he’s never shown anyone.”
“That was before.”
“Before what? Before he panicked and said the worst possible thing at the worst possible moment?” She shook her head. “Edda, you’ve spent eleven years building walls so high you need a ladder just to see over them. You really think you’re the only one who does that?”
I didn’t answer.
“He messed up,” Lina said. “Badly. And you walked out, which you had every right to do. But you’ve also been ignoring his calls, hiding out in your shop, refusing to let anyone help you process this. Which is exactly what you do when something actually matters.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
My grip tightened on the sandwich until I realized I wasn’t eating it anymore.
I set it down and pressed my palms flat against the workbench.
“Because I can’t afford to be wrong about him.
” My voice broke on the last word, sharper than I meant it to be.
“If I let him back in and he treats this like another transaction, another problem to manage, I don’t know if I come back from that.
And now there’s a kid involved. A kid who didn’t ask for any of this. ”
Lina stood and crossed the small space between us. Her hands settled on my shoulders, steadying without pushing.
“You’re not your father,” she said quietly.
The words landed hard. My throat tightened before I could stop it.
"I know you think you have to do everything alone because he couldn't do anything right. But you're not him. You've never been him. And needing someone, really needing them, doesn't make you weak. It makes you human."
I didn't have an answer for that. Lina's hands stayed on my shoulders a moment longer, steady and warm, like she was anchoring something in me I didn't fully trust yet.
The smell of machine oil clung to the shop, threaded with the faint sweetness of fresh bread from the bakery next door. Ordinary things. Solid things. Things that didn't ask me to explain myself.
When she finally left, I went back to work. The Schwinn was already halfway back to life, so I finished it, then moved on to Mrs. Petrova's grandson's bike. Familiar rhythm. Clean breaks, tightened bolts, tuned chains. My hands stayed busy even when my thoughts drifted.
At four, I found myself at the front window again.
The street had filled in, afternoon movement spilling past the glass. A man in a suit walked by, phone pressed to his ear, and for a second, my mind made him into Bennett before I could stop it. Wrong height. Wrong build. Wrong presence entirely.
Still, my chest tightened anyway.
I stayed there longer than I needed to, watching the light shift across the pavement, tracking the slow stretch of shadows as if it gave me something to hold onto. Lina's words kept circling back. Needing someone. Being human.
And then there was the article, still open on my laptop behind the counter. Cassel's words, clean and confident, were turning my life into something staged for public consumption. I hadn't closed it. I couldn't decide if I wanted to prove him wrong or understand why it stung so much.
And then it hit me, I hadn’t been performing in that back hallway with Bennett. Not the way I reached for him. Not the way I said his name, like I had no interest in holding it back. Not the sound I made when he pressed me against the workbench and told me I was the only problem he couldn’t solve.
That wasn’t an act.
None of it had been.
The question was whether something real like that was enough to change anything.
I turned away from the window and let my gaze settle on the shop.
The tools are hanging in their places. The restored Peugeot is behind glass.
The someday jar on the counter, still sitting there like a quiet promise I refused to let go of.
Eleven years built on stubborn work and the kind of pride that didn’t ask permission.
Diana Cassel wanted to flatten all of it into a headline. Turn me into a warning about what happens when a woman like me gets too close to a billionaire like Bennett Thornhill.
She was wrong.
At least about me.
My phone was still in my hand. Bennett’s missed calls stacked neatly across the screen, voicemails I hadn’t listened to yet sitting just beneath them. My thumb hovered, then moved past them to a number I had saved three months ago and never once used.
The business journal tip line.
I didn’t call. Not yet. But I saved it to my home screen anyway, right beside the photo of the someday jar I had taken as a reminder of what I was still building toward.
A clean exit if I needed one. A line I could cross if things went further than they already had.
Then I set the phone down and walked back to the workbench.
The bike wasn’t going to fix itself.