No Woman Wanted To Marry The Cruel & Infertile Mafia Boss — Until A Struggling Single Mom Walked In

## Chapter 3

On Saturday morning, the babysitter cancelled. Ruth brought Poppy to work, sat her in a small room by the kitchen with a sketchbook, told her not to go anywhere. But the room had a door onto the back porch, unlocked, opening onto a garden with a magnolia tree, and no child fresh from two hospital days could resist it.

Ruth found her empty room forty minutes later. Poppy sat on the garden steps, coloring a green-maned horse, when she heard the cane — tap, drag — and looked up to find August Howerin three steps away on his morning walk, the one thing on his schedule no one was permitted to write down.

He stood still, waiting for the sharp intake of breath, the hand rising to a mouth.

“Who are you?” Poppy asked, tilting her head.

“I live here.”

“Oh.” She kept coloring, then looked up again. “I’m Poppy. My mom cleans your house.” Sunlight slanted across his neck and the back of his left hand — the parts he’d built an entire system of habits around concealing. He began tugging his sleeve down. Poppy had already seen.

“Oh,” she said. “You have them, too.” She pulled her own sleeve up, showing a faint pink mark on her arm. “I have one here. Miss Deb says it’ll keep fading, but I think it’s still there.” She studied his hand with frank concentration. “You have a lot more than I do.”

“Yes.”

“That means you’re better at it than I am. Having more means you’ve managed to do it more times.” She rose, crossed to him, took his left hand in both of hers, turned it over beneath the sunlight, and traced a raised line from his thumb to his wrist — quietly, without hurry, without the slightest revulsion.

August Howerin stood motionless. Something broke open very softly behind his ribs. For all those years, not one living soul had touched that hand.

“Your hand is so cold,” Poppy said.

Running footsteps. Ruth pulled her daughter away, apologizing in a breathless rush. August bent, picked up the fallen sketchbook, said only, “She forgot her crayons,” and continued his walk into the hydrangeas.

That night, downstairs in the kitchen, at the hour when the household staff sat around the long table eating their late meal, Marlene the cook told Ruth about an employee named Bishop, keeping her voice low even though only four people sat in the kitchen. Bishop had worked for the family eleven years, keeping the warehouse accounts. He had a wife, two grown children, and every summer he brought zucchini from his own garden to share with everyone in the kitchen. Then the previous spring, they discovered he’d been taking a few things out.

“No one laid a hand on him,” Marlene emphasized. “No one waited for him in the parking lot. No police car arrived, and there wasn’t a sound. The boss simply told him he could leave. That was all.” Bishop drove himself home. Two weeks later he applied for a job at a freight company in Dundalk, and they never called him back. Another place in Sparrows Point didn’t call either. Even his own brother-in-law’s paint shop suddenly had no need for another worker. “He’s moved to another state now,” Marlene said. “Somewhere over in Delaware, from what I hear.”

Ruth sat without speaking, both hands wrapped around a cup of cold tea, and thought of the even voice in the glass room that hadn’t risen once.

That night the wind changed, and Ruth heard the cane in the hallway — slower, with long pauses. She made potato soup, her mother’s recipe, and carried it up. “I didn’t ask for food,” he said. “It’s hot,” she answered. “You lose nothing if you don’t eat it.” Before she left, he asked, “How old is the child?” and by the time she reached the door, she’d told him everything — the dialysis, the insurance, the weekly cost she paid herself.

The next morning, the hospital called. Poppy’s entire balance had been paid, along with an advance covering the following year. When Ruth confronted him, he said only, “I bought some quiet. It cost far less than you imagine.” She thanked him softly and left, understanding she’d just been told a lie she wasn’t permitted to expose.