Theo put down the fountain pen and capped it. He did it carefully, the way he'd set the sugar bowl back in the middle of the table at Café Marguerite. Then he stood up.
"You paid me nothing," he said. "I paid you. Every cent, with interest. Your own accountant signed off the last of it in January."
"The money," said Graham Pike, "was never the important part of our arrangement, and you know it."
"Dad," said Julian.
"Sit down, Julian."
Julian didn't sit down. He didn't say anything else either. He stood at the head of the table with his napkin crushed in one fist, looking at his father as if he were trying to remember where he'd seen him before.
Celeste rose and put a hand on Julian's arm. "Graham, I don't know what's happening, but these are my florists and this is my dinner."
"Your florists." Pike turned his coin-colored eyes on me for the first time with any interest at all. "You'd be the Bell girl. Ruth Bell's daughter. Has he told you about our arrangement, Miss Bell?"
My mouth was dry. "Not yet."
"No," said Pike. "He always did like his secrets."
Theo's hand found mine under the table. His palm was ice cold.
"Come on," he said, very quietly. "Not here."
We went down the service stairs because the lift was too slow. Nineteen floors of concrete and fire doors, his hand around mine the whole way, both of us breathing too hard. At the bottom he shoved through a door that said STAFF ONLY and we came out into an alley full of bins, and he let go of me and put both hands on the brick wall and bent over as if he'd been running for seven years.
We walked home along the river. It took forty minutes. He told me the whole thing in pieces, the way true stories come out.
"Our engagement party," he said. "The Fox and Lantern. Do you remember going home early?"
"I had a migraine."
"You had a migraine because a drunk boy in a blue blazer followed you down the corridor to the ladies' room and grabbed your wrist and wouldn't let go. You pulled free and went home and didn't tell me, because you didn't want to spoil the party."
I stopped walking. I remembered a hand. A laugh. A smell of whisky. I had folded it up and put it away and never taken it out again.
"Julian," I said.
"He was twenty-two. I saw it from the bar. I followed him out to the car park, and I broke his nose." He said it flatly, with no pride at all. "I'd never hit anybody in my life. I've never hit anybody since."
"Theo."
"His father owned the building your mother's shop was in. Bell & Bloom was three years behind on rent, Nora. Your mother had borrowed against the lease to keep it open and hid it from you. And my dad had borrowed from Pike to rebuild the greenhouses after the flood. Pike held both loans. He came to the nursery the Thursday before our wedding with two lawyers and a folder."
The river slid past us, black and quiet. A bicycle ticked by.
"Assault charges for his son's nose," Theo said. "Both loans called in on the Monday. Your mother's shop, gone. My dad's nursery, gone. Or I could leave. Alone. That week. No contact with you, ever, and I'd work off both debts on one of his farms overseas at whatever wage he decided." He looked at the water. "He said his son had wanted you, and if Julian couldn't have you, the boy who broke his nose wasn't going to have you either. He said it like he was ordering lunch."
"You could have told me."
"Pike said if you ever found out, the deal was void. Your mother came to the nursery at midnight. She sat in my dad's office and cried and asked me to take it. She said you'd survive a broken heart, and you wouldn't survive losing your grandmother's shop." He finally looked at me. "She was right about one of those. I've never been sure which."
"So you went."
"I wrote the first letter at a quarter to seven in the morning in my dad's truck outside your mother's house. I gave it to her on the porch. Then I went to the airport."
We had reached Juniper Street. The cobbles shone under the lamps. My blue door, his green awning, the bakery dark at the top of the hill. He followed me into Bell & Bloom without either of us deciding it, through the shop and into the cold back room, and I leaned on the workbench because my legs had stopped working properly.
"Seven years," I said.
"It's paid now. Every cent. That's why I came back."
He was standing very close. I could smell the jasmine on his shirt from the arch. I put my hand flat on his chest and felt his heart going fast under it, and he made a low sound and bent his head, and my phone buzzed in my apron pocket.
Neither of us moved. It buzzed again.
I took it out. A text from my mother, who had never sent a text after nine o'clock in her life.
He came to my door in March and asked me not to tell you something. He hasn't told you everything. Ask him about March.
I looked up. "What happened in March?"
Theo didn't answer. His eyes went past me to the corkboard on the wall above the bench, and then, very briefly, up to the ceiling.
I followed them.
The landlord's note was where it had always been, pinned beside my order book. Typed, unsigned, only the initials J.H. And at the bottom, in pencil, the date for the skylight work. Thursday the 17th. The seven had a small bar through its middle.
On the roof three hours ago he had sat beside me writing Table 7, Table 17, Table 27, and crossed every one.
Above us was the new skylight, clean as a sheet of ice. The rent that hadn't gone up. The heating bill I'd stopped crying about. The kind stranger I had thanked every single morning since March when I touched that note for luck.
I looked from the pencil seven to the man in front of me. He didn't deny it. He didn't say anything at all.