Chapter 2 - A Wedding Dress in the Bakery
I arrived at Hart & Honey with the hem of my wedding dress tucked under my arm.
The front door was locked. My assistant manager, Jo, was wiping down the counter when she saw me through the glass. She dropped the towel and rushed over.
"Lena? What's wrong?"
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.
"Nathan didn't come," I said. "I need our bank statements."
She didn't ask what had happened at church. She turned the sign to CLOSED and brought me the laptop where we kept the bakery's bookkeeping records.
I'd opened the shop four years earlier with savings from restaurant jobs and a small loan my father helped me qualify for. We sold cakes, bread, and pastries, and supported five employees. I paid the business bills myself and had trusted Nathan to handle some wedding logistics because I was working sixty-hour weeks.
I had never authorized him to borrow against my bakery.
The bakery was not glamorous, but it was real. Samuel began mixing dough at four every morning. Jo negotiated delivery schedules and knew which customers needed sugar-free birthday cakes. We had taken years to earn the neighborhood’s trust, one warm loaf and one paid invoice at a time. I could not afford to let a secret account turn that work into a rumor.
The letters mentioned Westhaven Capital, a lender that specialized in small-business financing. I found three electronic transfers to an account associated with a vendor Nathan had introduced six months earlier. Their descriptions looked ordinary: equipment deposit, delivery retainer, event services.
Jo leaned closer.
"We didn't buy new equipment."
"I know."
"The event services were for the wedding," she said. "But I thought you paid the venue directly."
"I did."
I called the bank's fraud department, explained that I was concerned about possible unauthorized transactions, and asked what steps were available to protect the account. The representative confirmed that a new application for credit had recently been associated with my business information, but wouldn't discuss the details until identity and authorization could be verified through the proper process.
They advised me on securing access, preserving records, and submitting a formal dispute.
Nathan called seven times while I was on hold. I didn't answer.
Eli arrived carrying the garment bag I'd left in the church office. He didn't enter until I told him to.
"Did you know my bakery was involved?" I asked.
"No. Nathan told me he was borrowing against his design company."
Nathan ran a tiny event-design business that produced custom fixtures for restaurants. He wasn't always reliable about deadlines, but I had believed its finances were separate from mine.
I showed Eli the transfer descriptions.
He recognized the vendor name on one of them.
"It's Nathan's old college roommate's company," he said. "He used it for a job two years ago."
"Was the work real?"
"I don't know."
"Then don't tell me it was."
My mother arrived with a bag of clothing and held me so tightly the zipper of my dress pressed into my back. She wanted to bring me home, but I needed to finish preserving the records before logging out.
By midnight we'd secured the account, downloaded statements, and made a list of the transactions I didn't recognize. Jo promised to help reconcile invoices with actual deliveries.
When the others had gone, I sat on a flour sack in the storeroom and finally read Nathan's third letter.
Eli, I did what I swore I wouldn't do. If she finds out before Saturday, there won't be a wedding. I need one more week to fix the account. Don't let them come after Lena.
Below it Nathan had written a name I didn't know and a phone number.
The line beneath said: Ask Rebecca who signed the papers.
May you like
I had believed Rebecca was an ex-girlfriend Nathan hadn't spoken to in years.
By morning, I knew I would have to find out why her name was in the middle of my business.
