Chapter 42

Ryan

We went to bed that night, and though I thought Sara had a good time, she seemed a little bit distracted. She slept in her room, and I slept in mine. I respected that, wanting to give her whatever space she needed. On Sunday morning, when my phone went off at five o’clock, I just about cursed my PR agent out.

“It’s Sunday, dammit,” I groaned.

“Before you lose it, I want to see if you knew about the story in the Post,” she said.

“What story?” I said, sitting up in bed. “Please, don’t tell me it has anything to do with Sara.”

“No,” she said shortly. “It’s the in-depth interview with your former bestie and current criminal doing life in Sing Sing or wherever the hell he’s rotting behind bars.”

My eyes grew big, and I jumped out of the bed, running to my office. I looked around and remembered the paper was delivered downstairs. Was she serious? What interview was she talking about?

“I’m freaking out here,” I said. “What interview are you fucking talk about?”

“Get a copy of the Post and call me back,” she said, hanging up the phone.

Part of me wanted to completely ignore the whole damn thing. I was so tired of the craziness my life had turned into. I didn’t want to know what was going on. I wanted to hide away with Sara and pretend none of it ever happened. I couldn’t, though, and I thought it might be better if I knew what was going on before she did. I picked up my landline and called down to the lobby, asking them to send up a copy of the Post. Someone was up to my penthouse within five minutes, smiling as he handed it over. If only he knew what kind of hell was lurking on those pages for me, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be smiling. I took the paper in my office and sat down behind my desk, pulling out the story. I sat reading, my hand pressed to my forehead. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, but I had to admit, part of me had expected something like this to happen at some point. It was actually pretty shocking that, with all of the people who knew me back in the day always looking for some kind of payday, it hadn’t happened sooner than this. There were plenty of sources who knew exactly where I’d come from.

My best friend from high school, a guy I had run the streets with, pushed the limits with, and gotten in some serious trouble with had finally spilled the beans about my past. He had been locked up in prison for years after a string of armed robberies and eventually an attempted murder charge. From what I heard, the last place he hit, he ended up shooting the clerk in the chest. The guy survived, but Tyler got the maximum penalty for it. He had been in and out of trouble with the law since he was a kid, so it wasn’t really a surprise. He had told the press everything about my life before I made my money, and what a story he told. It sounded like he took all the facts from over the years and put a magical fairy tale spin on them to make me look even worse than I was as a kid. He didn’t talk about why I was doing what I did or that I hated every second of it. He made me into a street thug, no better than himself. Maybe at the time, I wasn’t any better, but I never robbed anyone and definitely never killed anyone.

My childhood was not easy, and there had been no one there to help me out as a kid. They talked about social services and therapists, but that wasn’t for kids like me. I had been poorer than dirt, always one step away from being on the streets. There were more nights than I cared to remember when I went to bed hungry, sometimes starving even. Food was not a necessity to my father, and it had been a luxury I could only afford when things were really good for us. By really good, I meant the lights were on, and my mother had picked up a couple of extra shifts. It wasn’t that my mother didn’t work hard all the time. She did. And in reality, she made more than enough for us to be comfortable with food on the table and a roof over our heads. The problem was not that. It had been my father. He would take my mother’s money before she even had a chance to pay one bill. Once he had it, it was as good as gone, and we were left with empty tummies and broken dreams.

The money stayed in my father’s hand for at most an hour. He either drank it down in a bottle of cheap booze, snorted it up his nose, or shot it up as fast as my mother could make the money. He was a junkie, a street hound, a man who had fallen trap to the drugs and the liquor that the streets were very well known for. He didn’t care about anything but his next fix, and he took advantage of my mother to get it, leaving her and the kids to starve and freeze inside our tiny rundown house. My druggie father was my most shameful secret. The fact that he didn’t care for us and left us to starve was just icing on that painful cake. I never really told anyone about him, trying to keep my past in the past and move forward without everyone knowing about it. I already struggled to fit in with the elite, and if they knew my father was a street bum, they would never accept me. My company relied on those people, and this was more than damaging to that persona I had built up to protect myself.

What was even worse was the fact that it wasn’t just me and my mom, I had little sisters too. I had to learn to take care of them, to make sure they didn’t starve or freeze in the winters. My mother did the best she could, but she had a lot on her plate with so many jobs and making sure she could stow away some cash before my father found it. He would get violent if he didn’t get some money, so she had to split what she made, making sure he at least got something. A lot of times, though, he ended up finding it all. So, when I was old enough to use my hands and go outside, I found as many odd jobs as I finally could. I was young, maybe nine years old when I first got a job, but it was that or continue to watch my sisters go to bed hungry. Eventually, after a couple years of developing a name on the street, I got a decent gig as a runner for one of the gangs in my neighborhood. I wasn’t initiated, just used as a runner for them.

They needed someone to move their drugs and weapons who wouldn’t find themselves in too much trouble if they got caught. I had been underage, so all that would happen to me at that point was a slap on the wrist. They didn’t lock up kids, and the boys’ detention facilities were so filled up, they only messed with you if you were hurting someone. I kept my nose down, though, and never actually got caught on any of my runs. I became their main guy to go with and made really decent money to boot. That and they always had my back when I needed it. As I got older and started reaching the age where they could lock me up if the system really wanted to, they took me off running. I was no longer a mule for the gangs and, instead, became an enforcer. I was the muscle to keep the junkies in line, pay off old debts, and find out information whenever anything shady was going down. They asked if I wanted to be initiated, but I turned them down, and surprisingly, they accepted that, finding my services and how I handled business to be too good to get rid of.

I didn’t like the job. I didn’t like being affiliated with a gang, but I needed to make money to provide for my family. I didn’t know any better, and I had grown up in that society, doing whatever I could to hustle myself into a better spot. I ran with some of the most dangerous gang members in the city for a long time, but when I saw an opening, I got myself out of it. It all kind of fell together perfectly. The cops had busted the head of the gang for murder, and everyone else dispersed, going into hiding until things calmed down. Me? I ran for the hills, glad to be done with that kind of work.

It helped that I had finally been able to kick my father out of the house just a couple of weeks before that. He no longer was a threat to us or our livelihood, and the money I made from the gang it wasn’t needed anymore. Unfortunately, what sparked me tossing his ass out was the fact that he had beaten my mother black and blue, trying to get at me, knowing I was the breadwinner, but I wasn’t giving him any of my money for drugs or alcohol. I could have killed him that day, but luckily, cooler heads prevailed.

Now, though, my dirty laundry was out there, blowing in the wind for everyone to see, including Sara. Every single thing I had to do when I was younger came flooding back, and I had worked so hard to keep it buried. I cared a lot about what the socialites thought for business purposes, but even more than that, I cared what Sara thought about me as a person. It didn’t take long for me to realize that she had already read it. The only choice I had was to face it head-on and tell her the whole truth, hoping she would understand. Across the table from her over breakfast, I laid it all out there, telling her every sordid detail. When I was done, I sat waiting for her response.

“I know you’re a decent guy,” she said with a kind smile. “People sometimes have to face hard choices in life. I’m not here to judge you on your past, I would rather make my decisions on who you are in the present. The man you have grown to be is what’s important to me.”

She got up from the table and walked around, pulling me to my feet. She leaned forward and gave me a big kiss, wrapping her arms around my neck and squeezing. I was relieved she felt that way but still anxious about everything else. That was when my phone started to ring again and again and again. It didn’t stop for the rest of the day.