chapter
Twenty-five
My parents were preparing for the Ellises’s annual Ugly Christmas Sweater party, held on the first Friday of December. There was always a prize for the ugliest sweater—something like a bottle of Macallan, to foster real competition—and if Daddy didn’t win this year, I did not want to see what could defeat the grinning, homicidal-snowman sweater he was wearing.
I had a web series to catch up on and every reason to escape pointless efforts to make sense of real life, so I was in the kitchen heating up an entree from the freezer. The lady who catered Mom’s parties and the occasional brunch also offered personal-chef services, so my mother rarely cooked now. Once a week, she ordered from an extensive menu like a noblewoman in a period piece, and voila, Chef Laurie prepared and delivered gourmet meals, à la carte items, and desserts to our freezer once a week. Everything was tasty, but none of it topped Isaac’s freshly prepared omelet.
The microwave hummed, my sesame-crusted scallops in wasabi over buckwheat noodles rotated, and I pressed two fingers to the ache in the center of my chest. I had promised myself not to summon my supervisor tonight in thought or deed, and there I was, standing in the kitchen, breaking that vow. I shoved that night and his cooking skills and his kiss from my mind, only to have those musings replaced with our interactions earlier, during my review. Trying to expel him from my thoughts was like digging in dry sand. It was wasted effort. He kept refilling my mind.
“Erin, come in,” he had said. I’d taken the chair in front of his desk as he slid my evaluation across the dark surface. “This is your copy. The original”—he gestured with the one in his hand—“will go into your file in HR.”
I looked over my copy, skimming the self-review and skipping ahead to the sections he had completed, rating my performance by bubbling a circle for each attribute, like a Scantron exam. Outstanding for Punctuality, Initiative, and Problem Solving. Exceeds Expectations for Productivity and Judgment. Meets Expectations for Communication.
“You basically gave me a C for Communication?”
He arched a brow and waited for me to recognize why.
I continued to keep client confidences to myself, a periodic cause of frustration for him, though he’d grown more tolerant of it. Sort of. “Ah.”
“I expect you’ll keep that C. As you implied once upon a time – it’s working, isn’t it? Also, you’re following the procedure you’ll want to follow when you’re a licensed counselor.”
I blinked. “You believe that will happen?”
He folded his hands on top of my review. “I believe you were meant to do it. Moreover, I attended one of the most challenging grad schools in the country, and you’re capable of doing the same.” He pressed his lips together and shook his head, eyes crinkling at the corners. “Quit smirking at my saying moreover. It’s a perfectly ordinary word.”
“Sure, if you’re forty. And maybe a liberal arts professor.” In reality, I found his old-fashioned vocabulary sexy, but teasing him about it was too easy. When he rolled his eyes, I bit my lip and decided I’d have to let him off the hook and tell him so, soon. Not now, but soon. “What about you? Urban planning?”
“Where did you—?”
“The books on your dresser.”
He picked up a pen and tapped it against his opposite hand. My casual observations rattled him. He tried so hard to be unknowable. To keep his personal life entirely separate from his professional life. One night and one unexpected mutual friend had botched that objective.
“It took me a little while to realize what I want to do with my life,” he said. “Believe it or not, there’s a shortage of little boys aspiring to optimize land use and infrastructure. I don’t think I knew what it was until I was in grad school.”
“But now you know. So what are you going to do about it?”
He stared at me across the expanse of his desk. “The hardest thing to do when you realize you’re off course is make the decision to get back on.” He wasn’t just answering my question; he was challenging me to do the same. He turned the page on my review, and I did the same with my copy.
Under Suggestions for Improvement, he’d written: “Work on asking for help, advice, or support when needed.” Under Commendation: “Erin is a strong client advocate. She listens and sincerely cares that clients are satisfied. She tackles challenges head-on, isn’t afraid to think outside the box, and learns from her mistakes. JMCH is fortunate to have her.”
The doorbell rang in the same two-second span the microwave finished heating my dinner. Jack scampered and yipped his way down the stairs, ran to the front window, and commenced barking. His stubby legs were just long enough for him to see out the low window. A moment later, the intercom beeped and my mother’s disembodied voice said, “Erin, check on that, would you? Probably just a delivery.”
I’d changed into yoga pants and a UT sweatshirt when I got home from work, but my feet were bare and chilled quickly on the marble floor. The sun had just set, and the automatic lights surrounding the house had begun to flicker on, along with thousands of white holiday lights encircling columns and tree trunks and strung artfully through branches and wound between the pointy finials of the wrought iron fence.
Every year after we got back home from Colorado, Mom had our house professionally decorated inside and out—a rare dissimilarity between Nana and Mom. The results were always stylish and magazine-spread worthy. Reindeer-themed one year, white and silver with red accents; Victorian the next, everything blue and gold. Whatever the designer recommended—whatever was au courant—cool and hip and impersonal.
This year’s trendy holiday motif was angels. Outside, they sat and stood along the roofline and gables like joyful gargoyles. Inside, they perched on mantels, were featured on velvet stockings, and covered the tree in silvery angelic poses.
Checking the peephole and expecting to see our UPS guy dashing back to his truck after leaving a pile of boxes by the door, I was not prepared for the person standing on our front porch.
I pulled the door open. “Isaac?”
He paused before replying, like he was surprised to see me, though he knew I lived here.
Jack tore around the corner, ran up to Isaac like he intended to take his leg off for a snack, and began sniffing and jumping on him. Isaac offered a hand and Jack growled, licked it, and resumed jumping.
“Jack, get down,” I said. He ignored me, per usual.
Isaac was wearing a lightweight tailored coat over what he’d worn to work, where I’d left him an hour ago, and he was holding a two-inch stack of documents. For a moment he seemed to be deciding whether to leave without saying or doing what he’d come for, and then he said, “Good evening, Ms. McIntyre. I need to speak with your father.”
His formality would have hurt, but it didn’t make sense. I started to ask, Are you okay? but Daddy, in his hideous sweater, appeared in the foyer and turned toward the door.
“Isaac. What’s happened? Is there a problem?”
Mom appeared on the stairs, but she stopped halfway down, listening. Jack ran to cower behind her legs when Daddy spoke.
I felt the same draw to Isaac I’d felt for months, but he trained his gaze on my father as though I weren’t there.
“I’ve come to bring you some information.” He didn’t move to hand over the documents in his hands. “I’m going to leave this with you, but first I’m going to give you a warning you don’t deserve.”
Daddy scowled, but the attempt to look stern in that sweater was beyond his ability. “I’m not sure what you mean by that—”
“I’ve found evidence of fraud and embezzling inside JMCH.”
Daddy’s glare was replaced by shock. He blinked, openmouthed. “What the— Jesus Christ.” He stepped back and gestured. “Come on in. Let’s go to my office—”
“I can say what I intend to say right here.” Isaac paused. I felt my father’s impatience build, mistaking caution for indecision. He’d started to interrupt when Isaac said, “I took a job at JMCH with a specific goal in mind—to find evidence of illegal activity. Because of what I knew of you, I believed you incapable of running an aboveboard company.”
“That’s a goddamned—”
“My uncle was Ezekiel James.”
Daddy jerked at the words, and my mother’s short gasp from the staircase was audible.
Isaac, filling the doorway like an avenging angel, reacted visibly to neither of their responses. “I see you remember his name. Good. Maybe you’ll remember that because of your greed or your racism or some combination of the two, you cut him out of the company he helped develop. You stole his design concepts and the location he’d scouted and proposed. You betrayed his trust.”
Daddy swallowed but said nothing, his jaw steeling and his eyes burning into Isaac’s. I was glad for the door at my back. My God, no wonder he’d wanted nothing to do with me.
“In my mind, a dirty cheat is always a dirty cheat. All I needed was the evidence to ruin you. But it didn’t go down like I thought it would. It made me a little angry at first. I’d come to wreak vengeance, not render aid. But then I saw the beauty of it. The betrayer becomes the betrayed. Fitting, really.”
A chill passed through me like a ghost. A fine mist of rain began falling behind Isaac, and when the wind gusted, I smelled the clean, sharp scent of it. I felt the cool moisture settle on my face and the tops of my feet. The slate stones of the sidewalk and circular drive began to darken in the glow of the landscape lighting. My father was silent, awaiting his sentence.
“Leo has been taking kickbacks from certain contractors. They bid an amount he feeds them ahead of time, beating out other bids. JMCH includes that expense in the cost of the home. When the contractor is paid, Leo takes a bit off the top. A few hundred here, a couple thousand there. In finance, we call it a haircut. Paid for by JMCH and, ultimately, our clients. He doesn’t do it often, and only with certain contractors. Like his friend, Phil.”
“Godfuckingdammit.”
Isaac continued. “What I couldn’t figure out was how Hank hadn’t caught it before I came on board. Few people can pull that sort of thing off for long without it being noticed. I found it when Leo’s numbers didn’t mesh with Erin’s. The foremen used to turn them in to me directly. Now she’s in the middle, getting information directly from clients and correcting discrepancies. He should have realized he was in more danger of getting caught, but he was too stupid or greedy to stop.”
I’d thought he was just too stupid to add. It had never occurred to me that my brother would steal from his father’s company.
“One of the things you’ll need to check is whether safety standards were met. There’s a chance—given what happened with the Anderson home—that quality was compromised on some homes, going back years. I didn’t find evidence of city-inspection bribery, but I didn’t look very closely. It’s a possibility.”
My parents would be ashamed of their son’s deceit, of course, but I knew them too well. They were as embarrassed that someone outside the family had caught it as they were that it had occurred. Daddy sighed heavily and held his hand out. “Thank you for bringing this to—”
“I’m not finished, Mr. McIntyre.” Another pause. No interruption this time. “I mentioned that I couldn’t figure out how this petty skimming hadn’t been caught. Last week, I finally made the connection. What a surprise to find that the trail didn’t lead to you. My first clue was evidence that a JMCH construction crew had recently performed extensive upgrades on an employee’s home. A slight conflict of interest, but nothing major—until JMCH picked up the tab for it. It was overreaching, and it was the reason I started digging in places I hadn’t dug before. JMCH has been paying fake contractors, vendors, and suppliers from accounts Hank Greene controls. The money is being routed to offshore accounts. Millions over the past decade. I didn’t bother to go back farther than that because this is not my problem. It’s yours.”
He handed the heavy document stack to my father, who almost dropped it. Daddy’s face was pure fury—the face of a man who wanted to tear the door off its hinges and throw punches into walls. Most people would be terrified of this enraged version of my father, terrified to relay this sort of news to him. Isaac’s expression exhibited no fear.
“I suggest you call Russell Spellman and start discussing what legal avenues to take. Get Rhett up to the building to lock down the system and copy Hank’s hard drive before he can cover his tracks. Tomorrow morning at the latest. If it were my decision, I’d do it tonight. Feel free to have him take me off clearance. I have copies of everything I need to prove what I’ve told you as well as the fact that I’m not involved. I’ve cleared out my office and wiped my computer. I’ll cooperate to provide legal evidence, but I won’t be returning to the office.
“One last point. I care about the people I work with. That’s why you’re getting that stack of documents and this heads-up. Most of them are good people, and I hope for their sakes you can fix this. For your own sake, I don’t care one motherfucking iota.”
“Is Zeke— Is he… is he okay?” My father’s question was pathetic, and he knew it. He wanted some sort of absolution. Some sort of It All Worked Out In The End.
Isaac did not give him what he wanted. “After your betrayal, my uncle went back to construction. He eventually started his own company, but he didn’t have a rich father-in-law as a financial backer, and high-interest business loans don’t have any give. Mere wobbles in the housing or construction sectors put him underwater. Just after his second bankruptcy, he lost his little sister, Lila—my mother. He took out a life insurance policy not long after we buried her. A week past the two-year clause prohibiting payout after suicide, Pop and I found him.”
My father’s face lost all color. My eyes glassed with tears as Isaac delivered those blows, reliving the painful memories with every word. His hands, now empty, were balled into fists, and his narrowed eyes held no mercy.
“If you have something to say to him, he’s buried at Oakwood. Don’t bullshit me with your justifications or regrets. I’m not hearing them.”
He moved his gaze to my mother, who was standing, white-knuckled, at the bottom of the staircase across the foyer. “Mrs. McIntyre, my aunt Selma wanted me to pass on a message. She’s grateful to you. The two of you were friends once upon a time, she said, planning lives and babies together. Until out of the blue, there was no partnership between your husbands and no friendship you would claim. ‘She dropped me like trash,’ she said. ‘It hurt, and I felt like a fool. But I learned who and what not to trust.’ I’ll let you decipher what she meant by that.”
I was going to be sick. My stomach heaved, my face burned, but my hands and feet were so cold I was shivering. My family had done those things to Isaac’s family. I hadn’t been wide of the mark, likening us to Romeo and Juliet. But I was not his sun, and a McIntyre was a McIntyre just as a rose was a rose. He did not love me, and I was both heartbroken and thankful, for his sake, that he didn’t.
He started to turn and stopped, staring at his feet, and I knew he was debating whether to look at me before he walked away forever. I was silent. If he needed to leave my parents’ house without ever laying eyes on me again, I wanted him to turn and go.
He raised his eyes, and the soft light of the porch lamps reflected in their depths. “Remember what I told you this morning, Ms. McIntyre. You were meant to do it.” He turned, resolute. The sidewalk was lit like a runway that would take him away from me forever.
He’d rounded his car and opened the door before I lurched from my stupor as though I’d been picked up and shaken. “Isaac!” Heedless of the wet pavement, the cold, my mother’s voice calling me back, I ran.
He stood and waited, the faint crease of his brow disclosing his bewilderment.
I stopped a foot in front of him, hugging my arms around myself to keep from grabbing hold of him, and stared up into his eyes, close range. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry my family did this to you.” As if a switch was thrown, I felt the cold, rain-soaked asphalt beneath my feet and the drizzle of light rain on my face. I felt the reality of never seeing him again. A concentrated shudder began in my chest. I locked my teeth together and fought tears.
“I don’t hold you responsible, Ms. McIntyre.” Drops beaded in his hair like tiny crystals.
What’s in a name? Sometimes everything. “Please don’t call me that.”
He took pity on me. “Erin. I don’t hold you responsible.” He stepped closer, mindful of my feet, and took my face in his warm hands. One thumb moved over my quivering lips, the other wiped wetness from my face, and I wasn’t sure if I was crying or it was just rain. “You’re freezing,” he said. “Go back inside.”
I untwisted my arms and burrowed into his chest, sure he would push me away. His heart beat just beneath my ear, strong and steady. His arms slid around me, more to warm than to embrace, I thought. His spicy aftershave, barely detectable this late in the day, blended with the smell of the rain and the subtle musky scent I recognized from the one night we had been this close.
“Will you kiss me?” I mumbled the request into his chest.
I knew he heard me, because his chest flexed beneath my cheek. He loosened his hold, and I braced for the refusal he had every right to make. His body twisted, repositioning, and his hand slipped beneath my chin to tip my face up. His back to his car—and my house—he pulled me in and leaned his face to mine. I stretched on my toes to meet him, my body arcing into his.
Our first and only kiss had been a trial run—cautious, hesitant. An exploratory assessment. This was none of those things. Our lips met, and his eyes closed as if in inescapable surrender; mine fell shut as his mouth claimed mine. Spark. Ignition. Detonation. Fireworks. The hand at my jaw skimmed behind my neck, forked into my hair, and cradled my head. Prying my mouth open, he swept his tongue across mine. My feet were no longer planted on the ground. I was no longer a singular entity. I was a million bits of chemical flame, illuminating the sky for one dazzling moment before vanishing.
The sweet friction of his lips sliding against mine, pressing forward, pulling back, a fraction harder and deeper with each advance, made me breathless. He led without controlling, setting the pace as I dragged him closer. Nothing mattered but the small portion of the universe we inhabited. An insignificant bubble of time and space that belonged to us. As angled as my body was, there was no danger of toppling backward. His arms were firm, one at the small of my back and the other inclining my head just so. He held me securely, but I was falling all the same.
The rain had grown heavier. No thunderstorm, but drops had begun to form. I felt them on my lashes and the strands of wet hair affixed to my face. I heard them pattering against the roof of his car. When he withdrew his mouth from mine, I felt the drops on my lips. I opened my eyes to his. They were as dark and mysterious as they’d ever been.
“Go back inside now. It’s cold, and you’re getting soaked.”
Lower lip between my teeth, I took in every detail of his face, committing it to memory. “I want to come live in the city you plan someday. Will you let me know when you’ve done it? I want a little cottage like Tuli’s. And a dog like Pete.” And a man like you. Strong. Kind. Honest.
“I’ll hit you up. Save you the best tiny old house I can find. Build you one and make it look old, if that’s what you want. Please go inside, Erin.”
I nodded, thankful for rain that hopefully blended my tears away.
He leaned his forehead to mine and sighed. “You’re gonna be okay. I believe that. I want you to believe it too.”
My throat constricted. It hurt to swallow. “Will you be okay? You didn’t get what you wanted.” My father would likely sustain both his reputation and fortune, though perhaps Isaac was right in his prediction of what the joint treacheries of his eldest son and one of his oldest friends would do to him. That cost was immeasurable.
“I’m good. And I didn’t really know what I wanted until now.”
I leaned up, palms holding his face, and kissed him once more—a chaste graze of our lips, nothing more. “Go get it, Isaac.”
His hands at my waist squeezed and let me go. I ran back to the house. The front door was closed, and I heard nothing when I opened it. No yelling, no conversation, no barking—nothing. When I turned back to shut the door, Isaac’s car was pulling away.