Chapter 8 - The Return to the Griddle
The diner didn't smell like bleach anymore. It smelled like bacon grease, fresh coffee, and the sweet, heavy scent of blueberry hotcakes that Mr. Sullivan had been flipping since four in the morning.
It had been three weeks since the trial, and the South Boston streets were finally clear of the gray sedans. The Moreau syndicate had pulled their operations back across the Connecticut line, leaving the piers to the old families and the dockworkers who had spent thirty years loading the crates.
Elara stood by the griddle, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her raw hands working the iron scraper with a slow, rhythmic precision that felt like a recovery.
The babies were upstairs in her apartment, sleeping in two wooden cribs that Julian had carried up the narrow stairs on Tuesday afternoon. Mrs. Gable had come with them, bringing three boxes of old linen and a silver rattle that had been used by Cassius’s father when the Vales were still living in a brick house on Commercial Street.
"He's here, Elara," Sullivan said, stepping out of the office with a clean apron over his arm.
Cassius Vale walked through the front door of the diner. He wasn't wearing his suit today; he was wearing a heavy, dark gray wool sweater that made him look broader, less like a Don and more like the men who worked the iron lines down by the channel. He sat in the corner booth—the one where the plainclothes detectives used to sit—and dropped a small leather portfolio onto the table.
"The title is clear, Elara," he said as she walked over with her coffee pot.
"The title to what?"
"The Grace timber lines in Maine," he said, his long fingers unhooking the brass latch of the folder. "The probate court in Portland finished the audit yesterday. It turns out your grandfather didn't sell the land to the banks in 2014. He leased it for twenty years to a shipping concern that was owned by my grandfather. The lease expired on April first."
He looked up at her, his blue eyes clear and completely still in the morning light. "The property belongs to you, Elara. All forty thousand acres of it. The current valuation is approximately seven million dollars."
Elara looked down at the coffee pot, then at the leather folder. "I don't want seven million dollars, Cassius. I want to finish my clinical rotation at the county hospital."
"The hospital has already accepted your re-enrollment," he said, a small, genuine smile appearing on his lips—one that she hadn't seen since the night he fell through her back door with two babies strapped to his chest. "The dean called my office this morning. She said your tuition was paid through 2028 by an anonymous donor from the North End."
"You're a very disruptive man, Mr. Vale," she said, filling his cup until the black liquid was a fraction of an inch from the brim.
"I'm a man with two children who need a nurse who doesn't look at a ledger when they cry," he said, his hand reaching out to touch her wrist, right beside the silver bracelet with the tiny flower charm. "And I'm a man who doesn't like to sleep in a house with forty rooms when the only person who knows how to fix his ribs is living above a diner in South Boston."
Elara looked out the window, where the sun was finally breaking through the New England fog, turning the gray water of the channel into a brilliant, hard silver.
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"The apartment upstairs has three rooms, Cassius," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, steady register that had kept him alive behind the potato sacks. "And the stairs are very steep for a man with a bad side."
"I've climbed worse hills, Elara," he said, standing up and taking the coffee pot from her hand, his fingers wide and warm against hers. "And I've always liked the smell of blueberry hotcakes before the morning shift."
