No Woman Wanted To Marry The Cruel & Infertile Mafia Boss — Until A Struggling Single Mom Walked In
## Chapter 5
“If you’d been any later, there would have been nothing we could do,” the doctor told Ruth. Down the corridor, August stood with one hand on the railing, his scarred left hand bare for anyone to see, until someone finally brought his cane back in from the sidewalk.
On Monday, alone in the house, Ruth opened the drawer, photographed every page of the ledger, then sat all night on her kitchen floor with her back against a cabinet door, the message drafted and unsent, the phone screen going dark each time she waited too long to press send.
She thought of the letter that could be delivered to the iron gates in Roland Park, of four years of debt payments being erased and recalculated from the beginning. Then she thought of a man climbing five hospital steps with her daughter in his arms and a cane lying abandoned on the sidewalk behind him. She didn’t send it. She didn’t delete it either.
The next morning she told him everything — Gil, the photographs taken, the message never sent. “You missed three pages,” August said, before she’d finished speaking. “Pages forty-one, forty-two, and the last page. They were stuck together because of the damp. Those three pages are exactly what they need.” He pushed the phone toward her with two fingers. “This device has been connected to my system since the day you signed your contract in the kitchen. All thirty-one staff phones are connected the same way. It isn’t only you.”
“Then why didn’t you call the police? Why didn’t you dismiss me that very day?”
“Because I was waiting to see whether you would send them.” He rose, crossed to the window, and in the daylight Ruth saw what she hadn’t noticed when she came in — his eyes sunken, unshaven, the same shirt he’d worn the day before. “Three days. If you’d sent them, the number on the other end would reveal itself. From that number I could trace who was paying for it, and within two more weeks I’d have the name of the man putting my seal on the crates at Pier 11. You were the shortest path I’d found in two years. All I had to do was remain still and let you do what you were going to do.”
“Then why are you telling me?” Ruth’s voice broke. “Why didn’t you just keep waiting?”
He turned and looked at her. “Last night I sat outside your kitchen door,” he said. “The black car was parked half a block away. I sat there from before nightfall. I watched the light in your kitchen burn all night. I never saw you turn it off. When morning came and no message had gone through, I drove home.” He spoke the next sentence slowly, like a man setting down something heavy he had carried too long. “I intended to use you, Miss Brangan. I planned it very carefully, and I didn’t feel the slightest guilt until this morning. Now I can’t use you anymore. That is my problem, not yours.”
Ruth told him then, for the first time in four years, about the three months she’d lived in her car with Poppy after Gil vanished and the creditors came — washing dishes for cash at a Dundalk restaurant, parking behind an all-night supermarket for the lights and cameras, no insurance, no doctor, the congenital kidney condition that might have been caught sooner if she’d had somewhere to stay. She told him how Poppy remembered those months as a happy camping trip, counting stars through the windshield every night, and how everyone who heard the story laughed and waited for Ruth to laugh with them. “And I do,” she said. “Every single time.”
“When no one accuses you of the crime,” August said quietly, “there’s no one who can forgive you for it. That’s the kind of thing a person has to carry forever.”
That Thursday, dancing slowly with Poppy in the kitchen to the old transistor radio, August let Ruth close the distance between them when her turn came, his scarred hand resting against her back. She kissed him. Downstairs, glass shattered.
Three intruders had broken in. Walter, alone in the corridor with only a flashlight, was struck down, an old table and vase crashing with him. Then came the sound everyone in the house knew — knock, drag, knock, drag — slow and unhurried, and August Howerin’s scarred hand emerged first into the flashlight’s beam.
“You just touched the only person left in this world who still calls me by my name,” he said.
It was over in the time it took to boil a kettle.