The Pakhan's Librarian (Mafia Wife Revenge Romance #2)

1. The Quarter’s End

The Quarter’s End

The Philadelphia Historical Library occupies a granite building on Locust Street, its marble steps worn into shallow dips by a century of scholars.

Inside, the reading room rises two stories to a coffered ceiling, tall windows laying warm panels of light across the old oak tables, the air smelling of paper, leather, and lavender wax.

I have worked beneath that ceiling for twenty-three years. My shoulders still loosen every morning when the doors close behind me. Out in the world, I’m a quiet woman people look past. In here, I’m the person everyone comes to find.

I’m forty-nine, with hazel eyes and soft brown hair threaded with gray I’ve never bothered to color.

Graham has suggested a colorist more than once, always gently, a good one, he says, would take ten years off me.

I’ve smiled and gone on not thinking about it.

The gray doesn’t trouble me. It’s one of the few judgments I’ve ever quietly held against him.

It’s the first Thursday of April. I haven’t needed the calendar to tell me; the knowledge lives somewhere behind my breastbone.

On my lunch break I sign into the trust portal at the reference desk.

The quarterly distribution from the Charles and Evelyn Pembroke Family Trust has arrived on schedule.

I look at the number long enough to verify it, then close the browser.

My mother has been dead for twenty-two years.

This deposit is what remains of Evelyn Pembroke’s careful planning; beyond the money, my mother left a rope of pearls and a recipe box.

I never wear the pearls, but cook from that box every week.

My father likes to say money is a responsibility wearing a nice coat, and I honor the sentiment, driving a twelve-year-old Volvo with a heater that only warms after I’ve arrived somewhere.

The distribution will sit untouched for a few hours. Then Graham will find a reason to need it. He always does. I’ve stopped pretending I don’t know that, though I still pretend not to mind.

The afternoon fills with familiar work. A doctoral candidate from Penn appears at the desk hunting a publisher’s catalog the online record swears exists and the shelves swear it doesn’t.

I find it in eleven minutes, remembering the renovation that moved it three years before.

“How did you do that?” the student asks.

“Books stay where they’re put,” I say. “You just have to know who put them there.”

It comes out wiser than I intended. A title page either matches its record or it doesn’t, and I’ve built my whole professional life on that honesty, which lately stands apart from my evenings.

The Ross Dress for Less sits on City Avenue between a shoe warehouse and a party-supply store, a place Graham doesn’t know exists.

I stop there on the way home, my third visit in two weeks.

The navy blazer is still on its rack, size ten, thirty-four dollars, some designer’s overrun with the label snipped out.

I put it on over my work blouse in the fitting room’s unkind light.

The structured shoulders draw my spine straighter, and navy warms my hazel eyes.

For a moment I see an old photograph superimposed on the tired glass: myself at twenty-six, new MBA in hand, a woman with plans, opinions, and a future she trusted.

My fingers find the price tag and turn it over.

Thirty-four dollars. Last month Graham’s tailor charged eleven hundred to alter two suits, signed for without a glance.

This morning the invoice for a new dinner jacket reached my phone, forwarded with no message.

It isn’t vanity, Maggie. It’s presentation.

People in my position are judged before we open our mouths.

And people in mine, I think, aren’t seen at all, which is very economical.

I take the blazer off with more care than it requires and return it to the hanger, my thumb smoothing the lapel flat, the same gesture I use on repaired books.

Home is a 1920s stone colonial in Chestnut Hill, with a slate roof, an old wisteria, and a brass knocker from London, the kind of comfortable that is the most expensive look of all.

Visitors praise the garden and the restored woodwork, and Graham accepts every compliment with a modest tilt of his head, one I’ve once caught him rehearsing in the hallway mirror.

Almost no one knows the down payment came from the Pembroke trust, or that the roof and the garden walls were each presented to me as an investment in our future.

The chicken is out of the oven when I hear his key. He comes through the door carrying cedar and bergamot, tonight a ghost of chalk and wool from the tailor’s shop.

“Perfect timing,” Graham says, and kisses the air an inch from my cheek.

Graham Nathaniel Ellsworth III is fifty-three and looks it only in the ways that flatter him, tall and lean, kept that way by tennis at a club my trust joined.

Twenty-seven years ago that face turned toward me in a receiving line, past two prettier women. I felt chosen that night, a rare book finally taken down from its high shelf.

He hangs the garment bag on the hall closet door where I’ll pass it all evening. “The fitting went better than I expected. Paolo’s a genius.”

He loosens his tie and disappears into his study while I plate dinner.

Through the door comes the low murmur of a phone call, once a laugh, brief and bright.

My hands go still over the green beans before resuming.

He comes to the table smiling a small private smile, some victory he means to enjoy alone.

“You remember the gala next month,” he says, unfolding his napkin with a snap.

“I remember.”

“I’ll need another transfer.”

The serving spoon stops an inch above the potatoes. Steam rises past my wrist, damp and fragrant, and I watch it instead of him.

“I sent one yesterday.”

“You did.” His voice stays pleasant and unhurried, a man confirming an appointment. “That covered the jacket. This is different. Celia’s arranged a private dinner after the gala, a handful of European collectors. One evening like this can define a curatorship.”

Celia’s arranged. The name slides through the sentence without leaving a mark.

I set the spoon down and butter a roll I don’t want. My hands need a task my face can hide behind.

“How much?”

“Twenty thousand should cover it.”

The number itself doesn’t shock me. What registers is the ease of it, twenty thousand dollars asked in the tone another husband might use for groceries. Graham asks for it the way you ask for the salt.

“I thought the museum reimbursed collector dinners,” I say.

“Within reason.” The smile arrives with the patience he saves for explaining things to me. “This isn’t an evening for accountants, sweetheart. You’d understand if you saw how these men operate.”

I look at my plate. The chicken is going cold in its own juices. Under the table, my thumbnail presses a small crescent into the pad of my finger.

I could’ve said I have an MBA and understand exactly how these men operate.

My father has spent forty years doing business with men who make Graham’s collectors look tame, names I’ve known since girlhood and never once shared.

Some part of me decided long ago that he couldn’t be trusted with other people’s secrets, and it sits inside me, a load-bearing wall, unnoticed and holding everything up.

“If that’s what you need,” I say.

“I knew you’d understand.” He reaches across and squeezes my hand twice, his donor’s-wife squeeze. “This chicken is wonderful, by the way. You’ve always been able to do more with less.”

He goes back to his plate, never seeing my face. I watch him eat my family’s money in the form of rosemary chicken.

We finish the meal in the comfortable quiet he’s always mistaken for peace. He talks. I make the sounds that let him keep talking, then carry his plate to the sink; he thanks me and goes up to shower.

The dishwasher hums and the kitchen smells of lemon soap.

I dry my mother’s serving spoon by hand, as I always do, and certain questions come out while I work.

Why does every quarter produce an emergency the size of the distribution?

Why is thirty-four dollars an extravagance where twenty thousand is table conversation?

I have no answers. I only know the questions have stopped feeling disloyal, the way a binding fails one day, the spine hanging loose though the threads have been giving way for years.

I switch off the kitchen light and climb the stairs in the dark, my hand following the banister my family’s money restored.

Graham’s study door stands open an inch, lamplight lying in a warm stripe across the hallway runner. From inside comes the soft sound of my husband laughing at something on his screen, low and delighted, the laugh of a man entirely pleased with his world.

I stand in the dark hallway and listen. I know every laugh Graham owns, the measured one for trustees, the bright one for donors, the dry one for journalists who think they’re clever. I know this one too, though it takes a moment to place. It’s been years since I’ve heard it. Once, it was mine.

I go to bed without asking. I lie in the dark and wonder, eyes open, who has made my husband laugh that way.