Chapter 4

From the day Merlin Simmons first came to eat at my restaurant, every surveillance camera in the place had gone dead.

A coincidence like that was obviously somebody's deliberate handiwork.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and called the manager over to arrange for someone to get the cameras working again.

At the same time, I told him that after he closed out the books next month, he should also pull the footage of Merlin's visits and send it to me.

No need to remind him specially about the money—this time I wanted not just the bills Merlin never paid, but also the videos showing he never paid.

I was going to post it all in Georgette Harding's social circle. I'd like to see what they could say to that.

What did she mean, you couldn't even round off the small change? It was laughable—Merlin hadn't paid a single cent, plain and simple.

As for my relationship with Georgette, I lowered my lashes.

She and I had truly loved each other, but the moment Merlin appeared, she made me swallow my pride again and again for the sake of her male best friend.

In the past, she'd been afraid I'd lose out on anything, so she'd set a rule for my sake: anyone who came to a business under my name had to pay.

Not one cent short of what I was owed.

Back then she'd held my hand and said solemnly, "Without rules, nothing holds together."

And now she was breaking that rule herself, with her own hands, for Merlin.

The thought made my eyes go red, my heart aching and sour, as if someone had struck it with a blunt object.

Ten years of love had become a joke in this moment, and all the effort the elders had poured into the partnership between our two families was about to wash away too.

But the Henson family wasn't so poor that I had to force down this half-cooked meal. Strategies could change, relationships could be broken off.

Choose the wrong person, though, and that was a lifetime of suffering.

I did my best to press down the bitterness in my chest, but my resolve only hardened—I was going to get to the bottom of this.

On the night of Thanksgiving, the manager sent over the bills and the surveillance footage.

Without exception, every bill tied to Merlin was in the red.

After I went through every clip carefully, I actually laughed out of sheer anger.

Merlin had come in more than twenty days out of the month, and every single time he finished eating, he wiped his mouth and walked straight out.

Absurdity and fury filled my head. I was just about to organize the videos and bills and send them one by one to Georgette's friends—

when a call from an unknown number cut me off.

I answered on instinct, and Merlin's voice came through from the other end.

"Robin Henson, your family's food is really high-class. Tonight's Thanksgiving family dinner cost me forty-three thousand eight hundred, and I didn't like the sound of that number, so I wanted to round off the change—and you wouldn't even allow that."

In both of my encounters with Merlin, he had never spoken so urgently.

Now it was obvious—he really had been badly angered.

A forty-three-thousand-eight-hundred Thanksgiving dinner with no rounding off was indeed unlucky, and insulting on top of it.

But that was assuming he'd paid. I immediately added his phone number to my contacts and sent him the bills and the videos.

"If this is what you mean by supporting my family's business, then don't bother coming again."

There was a long silence on the other end—long enough that I assumed he'd gone quiet out of guilt.

Then he sent over a string of his own payment records, every recipient bearing the name of my restaurant.

I froze. Checking them one by one, I discovered he hadn't skimped a single cent, not even on tonight's dinner.

"But in the footage, you clearly left the moment you finished eating."

Hearing that, Merlin got even angrier, and then he said something that left me completely stunned.