Chapter Thirteen

Isolde's POV

I read the message so many times that the words stopped looking like words.

We should speak, daughter in law. I believe you are carrying my grandchild.

At six in the morning I was still sitting on the floor of my apartment with my back against the door, the phone warm in my hand. The sun came up pink over the rooftops. A garbage truck groaned somewhere below. And the one thing I kept thinking was, she called me daughter in law. In five years she never once called me that. She called me the girl. She called me Saffron's little arrangement.

I showed Dacre the message before I even took off my coat.

He read it standing at the window of his office with the city behind him. His face did not change, which is how I knew he was furious. He handed the phone back very gently.

"You will not meet her."

"She'll keep sending messages. She'll show up at my door. She'll go to Grandma's."

"Then I will deal with her."

"No." I surprised myself. "I want to hear what she says. I've spent five years not saying anything back to that woman. If I hide now, I'll be hiding for the rest of my life."

He turned. For a long moment he studied me, and I held still and let him.

"Where?" he said.

"The Mirabelle Room. Three o'clock. She picked it."

"Of course she did." A muscle moved in his jaw. "Pell drives you. I wait outside. If you want to leave, you send me one word."

"What word?"

"Any word."

"Pineapple," I said.

His mouth twitched. It was almost a smile. "Pineapple."

The Mirabelle Room was a tearoom for women who owned things. Pale green walls, silver pots, a pianist playing something soft in the corner. Lucinda Cole sat at the best table by the window in a navy suit and a double strand of pearls, a cup of tea untouched in front of her. She did not stand when I came in.

"You are late."

"I'm four minutes early."

"Then I am earlier." She gestured at the chair. "Sit. You look unwell."

"I'm pregnant."

"So I am told."

I sat. A waiter appeared, and I asked for water, and Lucinda ordered nothing. She studied me the way she once studied the roast at Sunday dinner, looking for the flaw.

"How far along?"

"That's not your business."

"Everything about my grandchild is my business." She folded her hands. "I will not insult us both by pretending to be surprised. I saw the file on my son's desk. Four lines of a doctor's note and I knew. You are carrying a Cole."

"I'm carrying my child."

"Do not be tiresome." She said it mildly. "Let us speak like adults. You have no money. You have a secretary's salary and a grandmother with a failing pension. You are living in an apartment that belongs to a man who is not your husband. I have done my research, Isolde. It took me one afternoon."

I kept my hands in my lap so she would not see them shake.

"What do you want?"

"What I have always wanted. The family name carried forward." She slid an envelope across the white tablecloth. "That is a check for two million. You will receive the same on the day the child is born, and the same each year until the age of eighteen. In return, the child will be raised in the Cole house. You will be permitted to visit."

The pianist hit a wrong note and went on. I looked at the envelope. I did not touch it.

"Permitted to visit."

"Twice a month. Supervised."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out short and strange, and a woman at the next table looked over.

"You think I'll sell her to you."

"Her?" Lucinda's eyebrows lifted. "You know the sex already?"

"I don't. I just don't like calling my baby it."

"Sentimental." She sighed. "You have been sentimental since the day Saffron brought you home. It was always going to end this way."

"It ended because your son handed me a pen."

"It ended because he was told to." Her voice sharpened, just slightly. "You think I do not know how he looked at you? I saw it every Sunday. I did what was necessary. A man in love is a man who can be hurt, and I was not going to let the Cole name be held hostage by a girl from Marlowe Street."

I stared at her.

"You knew," I said slowly. "You knew he loved me."

"I have always known everything about my son."

Something went very quiet inside me. Five years of cold dinners, of his eyes sliding past me, of lying awake wondering what I had done wrong. And she had known. She had sat across from me, passed the salt, and watched me wither.

"Take your check," I said, "and put it somewhere I would not like to say."

Her face went still. "Be careful."

"I've been careful my whole life. I'm tired of it." I stood. My chair scraped. "You do not get this child. You do not get a visit, or a photograph, or a name. I'm done being afraid of you, Mrs. Cole."

"Sit down."

"No."

"Your grandmother's house on Marlowe Street." She did not raise her voice. "Do you know who holds the loan on it? The Harlan Savings Bank. I sit on its board. A letter from me, and she has thirty days."

The room tilted. My palm slapped flat against the table. I thought of Grandma's tomato plants lined up in paint buckets. The cracked television. The kettle on the stove.

"You wouldn't."

"I have already begun." Lucinda lifted her teacup for the first time and took a small sip. "Brandt will see you home."

A heavy man in a gray coat had materialized by the door. I had not noticed him come in. He gave me a polite nod, the way you might nod to a package.

I walked out. My knees almost failed on the steps. Pell's car was at the curb, and I got in and said, in a voice I didn't recognize, "Pineapple."

Dacre was already on the phone.

By the time we reached Marlowe Street the sun was low and orange over the rooftops. Pell took the corner slowly, and I felt my stomach turn over.

A black sedan was parked outside my grandmother's gate. Two men in suits stood on the footpath with a leather folder. And on the porch, in her faded blue house dress and her scarf, her glasses halfway down her nose, stood Grandma Odette with a broom held in both hands like a sword.

"I do not care what your paper says," she was telling them in a voice I had never heard from her. "You are standing on my grass."

One of the men held out an envelope. The other glanced up the street and saw our car. His expression changed.

I was out of the door before Pell stopped.