My Fiancé Betrayed Me and Hurt My Puppy. The Mafia Boss Said, “Tonight, They Beg You.”

Chapter 2

The stranger paid the clinic in cash and gave her the name of a small hotel two streets away, paid for three nights, and left before Clara could argue. He did not offer his own house. He was too careful for that, and she did not understand yet how much that caution meant.

At four in the morning she sat on the edge of a stiff hotel bed with Pip’s empty crate on the floor and understood, for the first time in her adult life, that she had no one to call. Her parents were gone. Her friends were Grant’s friends. Her grandmother — the only person who had ever made the world feel load-bearing — had been dead four years, and Clara had spent those four years pretending that inheriting the boarding house was the same as having her back.

In the morning, a woman named Pearl Calloway knocked on the door with a paper bag of pastries and a brass key on a red ribbon. She was seventy-six, birdlike behind steel-framed glasses that had gone out of style twice, and she said, “I knew your grandmother. I would like to sit with you while you eat.”

Clara let her in because her voice sounded like Sunday afternoons at her grandmother’s kitchen table.

Pearl did not explain the key. She set it on the nightstand beside the untouched coffee and said, “Only, when Pip comes home, put this where he can see it.” Then she asked about the garden, and the color of the tile in the second-floor bathroom, and whether the little brass plate on the door of room seven was still there. Clara answered without thinking. Pearl never once mentioned Grant, or the fire, or the man in the black coat.