Page 69 of Sweet Ruin

The ones who look good are out of my budget, and the ones who are in my budget do not look good.

I wouldn’t trust—I have to squint at the screen to read the name—Sonny “Fast Boy” Grubb to litigate my way out of a parking ticket, much less a marriage. Eddie “The Law Leech” Castro is not any more promising.

The only option that’s even remotely plausible is a pinch-faced woman named Skye Brewer. She’s at least in professional attire and doesn’t have Photoshopped flames rising out of her ears.

That’ll have to do.

Her office is downtown, on the ninth floor of an alarmingly tilted building where the elevator has a hand-lettered sign taped inside it that says PLEASE DO NOT HOLD DOORS, THEY’LL CRUSH YOU AND ENJOY DOING SO.

Seems like we’re off to a great start.

Her waiting room has four beach chairs, three of which have gaping holes in the ass region, and a sad ficus that has given up all hope of ever seeing the sun again. The secretary at the desk, a woman so old that it feels almost criminal for her to still be working, takes my name and says Mrs. Brewer will be with me in a minute.

I sit in the only usable seat with my work bag on my knees like a kid outside the principal’s office.

Inside that bag, I’ve brought the goodies: four stapled pages, blood-smeared at one corner, and a double-sealed freezer bag with a burned scrap of paper in it.

I’m still undecided on if I’m going to bring up the loan thing yet. Somehow, it feels like a betrayal of Kane. He did ask me to keep him a secret, after all.

Which is batshit, obviously. He’s a loan shark. A criminal. A self-professed mob boss. And he said he’d be taking me as “repayment” for Connor’s sins.

So why the hell would I side with him?!

I don’t know. I might’ve fully lost my mind. Jury’s still out.

“Ms. Dorsey?”

The voice coming from the doorway is high-pitched and velvety-soft, like if a kitten could speak. I look up to see the woman on whom my fate seems to rest.

Skye Brewer is shorter than I thought. If she’s five feet tall, then I’m a size zero. Her hair is so blond it’s almost white, with a sharp nose and tightly pursed lips. But she doesn’t seem immediately incompetent, so I rise and follow her down the hall.

She’s got the most crowded office I’ve ever seen. Massive stacks of folders, binders, and books. With her being so tiny and the secretary working her desk being so deaf, I’m lowkey terrified that she is going to get crushed by a falling pile of paperwork and they won’t find her body for a very long time.

She points her chewed-up pencil at a chair that’s mostly buried. “You, there. Just move those.”

It takes both hands to excavate something I can use as a seat. I set the stack on the floor next to a box labeled BREWER — DISCOVERY — DO NOT MIX, which contains a half-full pitcher of apple juice and several boxes of crayons.

“Coffee?” she asks.

I shudder to think of how unclean her coffee machine must be. “No thank you.”

“Hm.” She scoots around and sits behind her desk. Squinting at her computer screen, which makes the one in my office look sleek and modern, she hums, “Dorsey, Dorsey, Dorsey… Divorce, yes?”

“Divorce is part of it.”

“Then let’s hear about the rest of it.” She pulls a legal pad out from under a binder. “Go ahead.”

I take a deep breath.

And then I begin.

“My name is Delilah Dorsey. I’ve been married for ten years to Connor Boyd. He’s been sleeping with my sister, Vivian Dorsey, since at least October of last year. I have video, hotel receipts, and fourteen months of their text messages. That’s all backed up in two places that aren’t the cloud he can get into.”

Her pencil stops moving.

“That’s the easy bit. The harder bit is that, on October 8th of this year, my husband borrowed four million dollars from a company called V Haven Holdings, LLC. He pledged my bakery at 4412 Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park as collateral. I bought it three years ago, I own it outright, and there’s nobody else on the deed.” I put down the four stapled pages, the blood-smeared corner facing up. “This is the year-end statement they mailed to my shop. It calls me the guarantor and says they intend to enforce against the collateral on January 15th.”

She looks at the pages with her jaw dropping by degrees.