Lucy slapped his hand away. “No, you never. And I never.” Reaching into her purse, she flung a dollar on the table. “For my drink.”
It was an absurd amount of money, money she couldn’t afford to spend, but it was the only way she could think to salvage her pride, to claim some control over the situation.
She grabbed up her hat, her bag. “Have a martini on me,” she said over her shoulder, and made for the stairs before Philip could extricate himself from the banquette, his long legs tangling against the legs of the table.
The waiters had seen worse scenes; they looked the other way as she ran from the room, down the malodorous stairs, past the gatekeeper in his loud checked suit.
The air on the street was little better than it had been inside, stinking in the July heat, thick with the scent of yesterday’s garbage. It had grown dark when she was inside, the creeping dusk of the city summer. It wrapped around her like damp flannel. The dark brought no relief from the summer heat; it only pressed it in more closely around her.
Lucy clutched her bag in both hands and started walking, as quickly as she could. But not fast enough.
Philip Schuyler came trotting along behind her, face flushed, tie askew. “Let me put you in a taxi, at least.”
“Like you do all your girls?”
“You’re not just any girl.” He darted around, in front of her, forcing her to a halt before the shuttered front of a greengrocer’s establishment. “There haven’t been other—I mean, there were, before Didi, but since then—there hasn’t been anyone. Not like that—”
He was floundering; polished, glib Mr. Schuyler, who could talk the most contumacious client into good humor. He didn’t look smooth and polished now. The veneer was off, his face raw and confused. He looked, Lucy realized, lost. As lost as she felt.
“You’ve had a spat with your fiancée,” she said, as matter-of-factly as she could. “And I happened to be there. That’s all.”
He shook his head, adamantly, the blond locks disarranged. In the light of the streetlamp, Lucy saw gray, gray she had never noticed before, beginning to thread its way into the blond.
“It’s not like that. Didi’s not—you’re not—”
Pity took the place of her anger, pity and an incredible sense of weariness. “Go home. Take a glass of soda water and an aspirin,” she advised. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
This time, when she started walking, he didn’t follow. He stood beneath the streetlight and watched her go, his face a mask of confusion.
When Lucy arrived at the office the next morning, there was a message with Miss Meechum. Mr. Schuyler had been called away to Philadelphia for an urgent meeting with a client.
Lucy had a shrewd idea of just who that client might be.
It was right, wasn’t it? she told herself, slamming the typewriter shuttle from one side to the other so hard that it nearly jammed. It made sense for Mr. Schuyler to go to Philadelphia to make his peace with his fiancée. She’d all but told him to. In fact, she had told him to, hadn’t she?
Either way, he’d done the right thing. He’d done the gentlemanly thing, removing himself from the office for a few days.
Why did it make her more angry, then?
When Lucy went into Mr. Schuyler’s office—always Mr. Schuyler now, never Philip—to leave him a stack of neatly typed copies of the Kiplinger contract, she found a folded piece of paper in the middle of the desk, with Miss Young written, in Mr. Schuyler’s elegant hand, across the outside.
Inside lay the same worn, crumpled dollar she had tossed on the table the night before.
No note. Just that dollar.
The phone on Mr. Schuyler’s desk rang. Didn’t that idiot at the switchboard know better than to put calls through when he was out of the office?
Lucy snatched up the phone. “Mr. Schuyler’s office,” she snapped.
“Miss Young?” The voice had a warm Carolina drawl. “You sounded so fearsome I hardly knew you.”
She hardly knew herself these days. Lucy glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I shouldn’t be talking with you at work.”
“I am a client, aren’t I?” said Mr. Ravenel mildly. Then, “Bad day?”
“Bad week.” Bad month. Bad year.
Nothing had been right since her father had died. His absence was a hollow in her heart. No matter how she had fought with her grandmother, no matter how she had yearned to move to the city, to try a new life, her father had been home for her.
She had lost him twice. Once when he died, and again that afternoon after his funeral when her grandmother had unleashed her terrible secret.
A cuckoo in the nest, her grandmother had called her. Your mother—no better than she should be.
And Lucy had remembered the pendant so hastily shoved in her pocket only a few months before, and her mother’s dying words. A legacy from her father, yes, but not the father she had believed to be hers.