Chapter 2 - THE COOKBOOK THAT SHOULD HAVE BURNED WITH HIS MOTHER
Dennis opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
“I asked a question,” Gabriel said. “What happens to everything else?”
“It’s… disposed of, sir.”
“By whom?”
“By me.”
“At whose instruction?”
Dennis tugged his collar. “Policy.”
“Mine?”
“The foundation’s.”
Gabriel went very still. It wasn’t dramatic. It was the stillness of a man hearing a name he hadn’t expected.
“Lucia’s Table is a hunger charity,” he said. “Its dinners feed four hundred donors. Where does the surplus go?”
Nobody answered.
Then, from the dish pit, very softly: “The truck hasn’t come in two years.”
Every head turned. The dishwasher, twenty at most, stared at his soapy hands as if they had betrayed him.
“What truck?” Gabriel said.
“The pantry truck. Mr. Cole sends it away at the dock. Says there’s no room.” He swallowed. “Then he throws it out. Every dinner.”
“And bills the foundation four thousand dollars for hauling,” Gabriel said. “I signed those invoices without reading them.”
Dennis had gone gray.
“Mr. Hart, I only did what Mr. Vincent—”
He stopped.
Gabriel’s eyes didn’t move.
“Say it again.”
“Mr. Vincent said it was routine, sir. Fees. Handling. He said you knew.”
“My uncle.”
Dennis said nothing.
Gabriel turned to the shelf, pressed a lid onto the chicken with one precise click, and handed me the bag.
“Go home to your son, Miss…?”
“Quinn. Nora.”
“Go home, Miss Quinn.”
I reached for the handles. My canvas bag slid off my shoulder. The strap caught. Everything tipped.
A thermos. A paper packet. A small book wrapped in a dish towel, which hit the tile and fell open.
Cracked green leather. Water-stained pages. Two gold letters on the cover.
L.H.
I bent to grab it.
Gabriel got there first.
He knelt on the kitchen floor in his black dinner jacket, holding my book in both hands as if it were burning him.
“Where did you get this?” His voice had no polish left.
“It’s a repair job. A client’s—”
“This burned with my mother.”
The kitchen stopped breathing.
“Twenty-seven years ago,” Gabriel said. “In a restaurant on Halsted. With her.”
Nobody in the kitchen moved.
Not Dennis. Not the dishwasher with the soapy hands. Not the line cooks scraping a grill that had been clean for an hour.
Gabriel Hart knelt on the tile with my book against his chest, and the most feared man in Chicago looked, for one terrible second, like a fourteen-year-old boy.
“Mr. Hart,” I said carefully. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“That it was hers.”
He looked up.
“Tell me how you got it.”
“Three months ago a woman brought a box to the shop where I worked. Teresa Pellegrino. Her aunt had died. Mostly junk. Old cookware. A rosary.” My voice steadied as it found the safe ground of facts. “And this. Water damage. Mold in the spine. The boards nearly detached. Mr. Abernathy handed it to me.”
“Bookbinder on Lawrence. He died in January. His daughter sold the building.” I swallowed. “The job was unpaid. I couldn’t leave it in a box on a shelf. So I’ve been finishing it at home.”
“Her aunt,” Gabriel said slowly. “Rosa.”
“Yes. Rosa Pellegrino.”
He closed his eyes.
“Rosa cooked for my mother for eleven years.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he cleared it. “She disappeared two weeks after the fire. I thought she was dead.”
“She wasn’t. She moved to Joliet. She died last winter.”
“And she had this the whole time.”
“It looks that way.”
Dennis made a small, strangled sound.
Gabriel didn’t look at him.
“Teddy.”
A man the size of a refrigerator appeared in the doorway. Gray suit. Scarred knuckles. Calm eyes.
“Boss.”
“Mr. Cole will wait in the manager’s office. Nobody speaks to him. Nobody lets him leave.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dennis went with Teddy, pale and quiet, like a man walking to the dentist.
The kitchen exhaled. Slowly, people found something to do.
Gabriel stood. He held the book out to me with both hands, the way you would return something fragile to a child.
“Finish it,” he said.
I stared at him.
“Your repair. I want you to finish it.”
“Mr. Hart—”
“Gabriel.”
“I have to go home.” The words came out thin. “My sitter leaves at ten. It’s nine-forty.”
He glanced at the clock. Then at the two containers on the steel counter, steam still lifting from the lids.
“Then we’ll take you home.”
“I take the bus.”
“Not tonight.”
“I can’t—”
“Miss Quinn.” He didn’t raise his voice. “I’m not asking you to owe me anything. I’m asking you to let a man drive you to your son. And to bring the book.”
May you like
Behind him, in the doorway, a small silver-haired woman had appeared in a good wool coat, one hand pressed to her chest. She was staring at the green book as if it were a ghost
“Gabriel,” she said, barely audible. “Is that Lucia’s?”
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