Chapter 3
I did not sleep that night.
I sat on the floor of the guest room with my back against the bed and my father’s notebook open in my lap, and I did not read a word of it. I just held it. There is a thing that happens when a dream you have carried for seven years is taken out of your hands and put on a table in front of you by someone you have never met — you go quiet. Not calm. Quiet. The way a room goes quiet.
At two in the morning I heard the kitchen.
Not noise, exactly. The specific sound of a refrigerator opening and a pan being set on a burner, and then, a minute later, the sound of a knife on a board — slow, steady, unhurried. The sound of a man chopping onions because he could not sleep.
I went down the hall.
Luke was standing at the stove in a t-shirt and sweatpants, barefoot, his hair pushed back, and there was already a pan of something dark and fragrant on the burner and a board of onions half chopped and a pot of stock going. The penthouse kitchen was a showpiece — marble and steel and a wine fridge the size of a wardrobe — and he was standing in the middle of it cooking like a line cook at the end of a shift.
He did not turn around.
“There’s enough for two,” he said.
I sat on a stool at the island.
He finished the onions. He added them to the pan. He poured stock. He moved the way I move — without thinking, hands deciding before the brain gets a vote — and I watched him and understood something I had not understood in the kitchen at the restaurant. This was not a hobby. This was the only place in his life where he was not being watched.
“Tell me about your father,” I said.
He was quiet for a while.
“Vincent Marino,” he said. “He built all of it. The restaurants, the hotels, the club. And the other part, which you have heard rumors about and which I am not going to lie to you about, because one of my rules is that I don’t lie to you, and I meant it.”
I waited.
“He is sixty-eight. He has never been sick a day in his life. He has a house in Lake Forest, a wife he has not spoken to since 2011, and a board of directors that has never once voted against him.” He stirred the pan. “And he has been trying to control what I do with my life since I was fourteen years old.”
“Including who you marry.”
Luke’s hand stopped on the spoon.
“Including who I marry,” he said.
He turned around.
“There’s a family called the Serranos,” he said. “Not like us. Worse than us, in a way that’s quieter. My father has wanted an alliance with them for eleven years. They have a daughter. He has decided that I will marry her in the spring.”
“And you don’t want to.”
“I’ve met her twice,” Luke said. “She is twenty-three and she is perfectly pleasant and she has absolutely no interest in me, and she is terrified of her father, and the whole thing is a transaction between two men who have never once asked either of us a single question.”
“So you invented a wife.”
“So I invented a wife.” He turned back to the stove. “Three months. Long enough to bring someone to my grandmother’s birthday, long enough for the story to get to my father, long enough that the Serranos hear about it and lose interest. Then a quiet divorce and everyone moves on.”
“And your grandmother?”
“My grandmother,” Luke said, “is the only person in my family who has ever asked me what I wanted.”
He served the food. It was a ragù, slow and dark and far better than it had any right to be at two in the morning, and I ate it standing at the island because there was nowhere else I wanted to sit.
“Your grandmother is the one who holds the company,” I said.
Luke’s spoon paused.
“How did you know that?”
“Because your father has been trying to control you for twenty years and you’re still here, and because when she walked in that door tonight, everybody in the room stood up.” I put my fork down. “And because you flinched when she asked what you do when you can’t sleep.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“My grandfather built the company,” he said finally. “My grandmother inherited the controlling interest when he died. She has never once used it. She has never once voted in a board meeting. She holds it the way you hold a fire extinguisher — for the one day it’s needed.”
“And if she dies?”
“Then it goes into a trust, and the trust is administered by a board, and my father sits on that board.” He set his fork down. “And a man who can’t control his own son is going to be very interested in controlling the trust.”
The kitchen was quiet except for the hood fan.
“So he bought the building,” I said.
“He bought the building.”
“Why?”
“Because he found out about you.” Luke looked at me and there was something terrible in his face — guilt, and something underneath it that was closer to awe. “He has people. He has had people inside my life since I was a child. He found out three days ago that I had hired a woman to be my wife, and he found out the one thing about you that actually matters, and he bought it before I could.”
“The one thing that matters.”
“That you would leave,” Luke said. “He’s not buying a building. He’s buying the reason you’d stay.”
I sat on the stool in that enormous kitchen and looked at a man I had known for four days, and I felt the whole shape of it settle into place like a key in a lock.
“He wants to see if I’ll walk,” I said.
“He wants to prove to my grandmother that nothing I have is real.” Luke’s voice was very level. “If you walk, I’m alone. And a man alone is a man who can be arranged.”
I picked up my fork and ate the last of the ragù.
“Then I’m not going to walk,” I said.
Luke looked up.
“Don’t say that because of the money.”
“I’m not saying it because of the money.” I set the fork down. “I’m saying it because your father just spent a great deal of money to prove that you have nothing that’s actually yours. And I’ve spent seven years building something that’s actually mine, and a man in Lake Forest just tried to buy it out from under me to make a point.” I looked at him. “I’ve decided I don’t like him.”
May you like
Luke Marino stared at me for a long moment.
Then he laughed — the same laugh as the kitchen, startled out of him, from the chest — and it was the first time in four days that I had seen the man underneath the suit do anything at all.
