Chapter 2
At sixteen, he promised my mother he would stop bringing business into the house.
Three months later, someone put a brick through our dining room window with a note attached to it.
After that, I stopped believing promises.
My mother never did.
She spent thirty-four years believing there was something good in my father that the rest of us simply failed to understand.
Maybe that was why her illness terrified me.
Catherine Mercer had always been the person who insisted that people were more than their worst choices.
If she disappeared, I wasn’t sure who I was without someone believing that about me.
A quiet knock came at the door.
I reached automatically toward the desk drawer.
Then Mom opened the door.
She wore slippers and a gray robe.
“Do you always reach for a gun when your mother visits?”
I removed my hand from the drawer.
“Only after midnight.”
She stepped inside.
“You should really work on that.”
“You should be asleep.”
“So should you.”
She lowered herself carefully into the chair across from me.
I stood.
“Do you need—”
“Sit down.”
I stopped.
She pointed.
“Sit.”
I obeyed.
Apparently twelve years of intimidating criminals had not prepared me to resist a seventy-year-old woman in orthopedic slippers.
Her gaze dropped to the untouched bourbon.
“You don’t drink when you’re worried.”
“I drink constantly.”
“You hold bourbon when you’re worried. There’s a difference.”
I sighed.
“What are you doing awake?”
“I heard you walking around.”
“From upstairs?”
“This house is old, Isaac. You have the footsteps of an angry rhinoceros.”
I looked at her.
She smiled.
And there it was again.
That thing I had almost forgotten.
Her.
Not the illness.
Not the patient.
My mother.
“I’m glad you’re downstairs more,” I said.
She studied me.
“That was difficult for you.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
I looked away.
She waited.
Mom had always understood silence as a tool better than most men in my business.
Finally I said, “Megan told me you wanted to do more.”
“Megan talks too much.”
“I think that might be her only hobby.”
Mom laughed quietly.
Then her expression became serious.
“I should have told you.”
“Told me what?”
“That I was unhappy.”
I frowned.
“You were sick.”
“Those are not the same thing.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because you were trying so hard.”
The answer irritated me.
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense when you love someone.”
“No. If something was wrong, you should have told me.”
“Would you have listened?”
“Yes.”
She raised one eyebrow.
I started to answer.
Then stopped.
Mom nodded.
“That’s what I thought.”
“I would have fixed it.”
“That is exactly the problem.”
Her voice wasn’t sharp.
That made it worse.
“You are always fixing things, Isaac.”
“That’s my job.”
“No. That’s your fear.”
I felt something inside me close.
Mom saw it happen.
She reached across the desk and touched my hand.
“When your father died, you became convinced that everything depended on you.”
“A lot of things did.”
“Yes. The company. The estate. People’s livelihoods. Me, to some extent.”
“To some extent?”
“You were twenty-eight years old, sweetheart. You should have been building a life, not inheriting everyone else’s.”
“I chose.”
“Did you?”
Her question sat between us.
My father died in the back seat of a car on Atlantic Avenue from a heart attack.
Not a bullet.
Not a rival family.
Not some dramatic ending worthy of the reputation surrounding him.
His heart simply stopped.
By sunrise the next morning, forty-seven men wanted to know what Isaac Mercer intended to do.
I had given them an answer.
I had been giving answers ever since.
Mom squeezed my fingers.
“I worry that you no longer know the difference between being needed and being loved.”
I pulled my hand away slowly.
“I think you’ve been spending too much time with Megan.”
Mom smiled.
“She says the same thing about you.”
That surprised me.
“What does she say?”
“That you’re impossible.”
“Anything else?”
“She says you have sad eyes.”
I stared at her.
Mom’s smile widened.
“Don’t look so terrified.”
“I’m going to fire her.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I might.”
“If you fire her, I’ll hire her myself.”
“With what money?”
Mom looked offended.
“Your father left me plenty.”
“I manage it.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a confession.”
For the first time that night, I laughed.
Quietly.
But it was enough.
Mom’s face softened.
Then she became serious again.
“There’s something else.”
I waited.
She looked toward the old bookshelves.
“Your father left me a box.”
I frowned.
“What box?”
“He gave it to me about six months before he died. He told me I was to keep it somewhere safe.”
“What was inside?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never opened it?”
“No.”
That sounded impossible.
My father trusted secrets the way other men trusted safes.
If he had given Mom something important, there was a reason.
“Where is it?”
Her fingers tightened slightly around the edge of her robe.
“That’s the problem.”
“What?”
“I don’t remember.”
The next morning, I postponed Boston.
For the first time in twelve years, three meetings were moved because I wanted to search my own house.
No one argued.
Megan arrived at eight carrying groceries.
She found me in the upstairs storage room with three boxes open around my feet.
She stopped in the doorway.
“Should I ask?”
“No.”
“All right.”
She started to leave.
“Megan.”
She turned.
“My mother mentioned a box.”
Her face changed.
Barely.
But again, I noticed.
“What kind of box?”
“I was hoping you knew.”
“I don’t.”
“You hesitated.”
“I was trying to remember whether she told me about one.”
“Did she?”
Megan set the grocery bag down.
“She mentioned losing something important.”
“When?”
“A few weeks ago.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“She didn’t want me to.”
I stared at her.
“That seems to be becoming a pattern.”
“She is an adult.”
“She is ill.”
“Those things can both be true.”
“You think keeping things from me is helping her?”
“I think respecting her choices helps her.”
“And if one of those choices puts her in danger?”
Megan’s eyes sharpened.
“Is the box dangerous?”
I didn’t answer.
She nodded slowly.
“Then maybe you should tell me what we’re looking for.”
I almost said no.
Instinct demanded it.
Information was leverage.
Leverage was survival.
But that instinct belonged to another world.
And somehow, standing among old Christmas decorations and dusty furniture, it felt ridiculous.
“My father gave it to her before he died.”
“What does it look like?”
“She doesn’t remember.”
“Then we aren’t looking for a box.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A memory.”
I disliked how quickly she said it.
“You make everything sound philosophical.”
“No. I clean houses. We work with what we have.”
She picked up the grocery bag.
“Come downstairs.”
“Why?”
“Your mother is awake.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“If you want to remember where someone put something years ago, don’t interrogate them. Recreate the day.”
I stared at her.
“You’ve done this before.”
Something passed through her expression.
Pain.
Then it disappeared.
“With my grandmother.”
That was all she said.
I followed her downstairs.
Mom remembered almost nothing about the box itself.
May you like
But she remembered the day.
“It was raining,” she said over breakfast.
