Chapter 4
“You left an untouched coffee at the hotel.”
“Because a suspicious woman interrupted me with a criminally underpriced proposal.”
She smiled.
“Are you trying to extend your contract?”
“No.”
The word came more quietly than I intended.
Nora’s smile faded.
I stepped closer.
“I’m asking you to have coffee with me.”
She searched my face.
“As my fake girlfriend?”
“No.”
The air changed.
Cars passed on the street.
Somewhere nearby, church bells marked the half hour.
Nora’s eyes stayed on mine.
“Evan…”
“You can say no.”
“What about the thousand dollars?”
“I was always giving it back.”
“What?”
I took the envelope from my pocket and placed it in her hand.
She stared down at it.
“You agreed.”
“I did.”
“You spent the entire afternoon with my family.”
“An experience I’ll never recover from.”
“Evan.”
I smiled.
“Buy an oven.”
Her eyes lifted sharply.
“How do you know I need an oven?”
“You complained about commercial convection ovens for six minutes in the car.”
“Oh.”
She looked at the money again.
“I don’t want charity.”
“It isn’t charity.”
“You worked.”
“I had cake.”
“That is not equal compensation.”
“It was excellent cake.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“You’re impossible.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I opened the passenger door.
“One coffee.”
Nora hesitated.
Then she got in.
We drove twenty minutes to a small café near the waterfront where nobody recognized me and the chairs didn’t match.
Nora ordered tea.
I objected on principle.
She ignored me.
For the first time all day, we talked without a script.
She told me about pastry school.
The first soufflé she ruined.
The chef who terrified her.
The night she realized she wanted her own place rather than someone else’s kitchen.
I told her about starting Cole Development.
Not everything.
But enough.
“My father owned a shipping company,” I said.
“What happened?”
“He died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“What about your mother?”
“Still alive.”
“Do you see her?”
I looked at my coffee.
“Not often.”
Nora seemed to understand there was more.
She didn’t press.
That, more than anything, made me want to tell her.
Instead, I asked about the bakery.
“What would you call it?”
She immediately became embarrassed.
“You already have a name.”
“No.”
“You do.”
She looked through the window.
“Maybe.”
“What is it?”
“No.”
“Nora.”
“It’s stupid.”
“I’ll decide.”
She sighed.
“Second Rise.”
I went quiet.
She misread my silence.
“See?”
“No.”
I leaned back.
“It’s good.”
“You don’t have to say that.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“The second rise is when dough develops structure.”
Her eyes widened.
“You bake?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then how do you know that?”
“I read.”
She smiled.
“That’s not why I chose it.”
“Why did you?”
Nora traced one finger around the rim of her cup.
“Because sometimes the first version of your life isn’t the one that becomes what you hoped.”
I looked at her.
She continued quietly.
“You get another chance to become something else.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Second Rise.
I understood the name more than she knew.
My phone buzzed.
Once.
Then again.
I glanced at the screen.
Daniel Mercer.
My chief operating officer.
And one of three people who knew every side of my business.
I ignored it.
The phone buzzed again.
Nora noticed.
“You can answer.”
“It can wait.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Daniel never called three times without reason.
The fourth call came less than a minute later.
I stood.
“Excuse me.”
Outside, I answered.
“What?”
Daniel skipped greetings.
“We found an issue with Wentworth.”
My attention sharpened.
“What issue?”
“The twenty-eight building.”
I looked through the café window.
Nora was sitting inside, looking down at something on her phone.
“What about it?”
“You asked me six months ago to hold redevelopment until we cleared the historical files.”
“I remembered.”
“We finally got the original survey archive.”
“And?”
Daniel hesitated.
“Cole Development may not have clean title to the rear courtyard.”
I frowned.
“That’s hardly urgent.”
“It is when somebody submitted a commercial lease application last month based on access rights through that courtyard.”
Nora.
“What exactly did Legal find?”
“An easement.”
“To whom?”
Another pause.
“The Bennett family.”
I went completely still.
“Explain.”
“In 1997, Thomas Bennett restored the row with your father’s company.”
“My father?”
“That’s what the records say.”
I looked back through the window.
Nora lifted her head.
Our eyes met through the glass.
She smiled.
Something cold and strangely personal settled in my chest.
“My father was involved with Wentworth?”
“Apparently more than involved.”
Daniel’s voice lowered.
“There’s a partnership agreement in the archive.”
“What partnership agreement?”
“Between Thomas Bennett and Charles Cole.”
My father.
Nora’s grandfather.
Twenty-eight Wentworth.
Two families.
A building neither Nora nor I had known connected them.
Daniel continued.
“And Evan?”
“What?”
“You need to see the last page.”
“Why?”
“Because according to this agreement, when Thomas Bennett died, his remaining interest was supposed to pass to his wife.”
I closed my eyes.
Eleanor.
“Which means?”
“Which means your company may own less of Twenty-eight Wentworth than we thought.”
“How much less?”
Daniel exhaled.
“Possibly half.”
I stared through the window at Nora.
She was still smiling at me.
Completely unaware.
The building she had spent months trying to convince a landlord to lease her might already belong, in part, to her own grandmother.
And somehow, my father had helped put it there.
For the first time all day, the lie between Nora and me felt very small compared with the truth waiting behind it.
I ended the call and returned to the table.
Nora studied my expression.
“Everything okay?”
I sat slowly.
“No.”
Her smile disappeared.
“What happened?”
I looked at her.
At the woman who had walked up to me that morning and offered a thousand dollars for one day of pretending.
At the woman whose family history had somehow crossed mine nearly thirty years before either of us knew it.
I could have told her immediately.
Maybe I should have.
Instead, I asked one question.
“Nora, how much do you know about your grandfather’s work?”
She frowned.
“Why?”
Because I had just learned the bakery she thought she had to fight for might be tied to a promise made before she was born.
Because my father, a man I had spent half my life trying not to resemble, had apparently left behind a secret I had never known existed.
Because Eleanor Bennett had known more than she told me.
And because, suddenly, the strangest thing about the day was no longer that Nora Bennett had hired me to be her boyfriend.
May you like
It was that our families had met long before we did.
“I think,” I said carefully, “there’s something at Twenty-eight Wentworth we both need to understand.”
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