Fifty-nine

Ten minutes later, even right turns wouldn’t have helped us.

Our driver was planted in the middle of standstill traffic, waiting for entry to the Brooklyn Bridge. I was about to call Tucker and check in when my phone dinged with a text message.

After all my attempts to raise my ex-husband’s ghost on the distressing subject of Cody Wood, Matt spooked me with exactly three words:

WE’LL TALK SOON.

That was it. That was all the answer my business partner saw fit to give me: We’ll talk soon.

No, Matt. We’ll talk now!

“Stay in the car and get back to the Blend,” I told Esther, popping the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To pick a fight.”

After zigzagging my way through the de facto parking lot, I ordered another rideshare and headed in the opposite direction—literally and figuratively.

Matt’s warehouse was located in Red Hook. Though geographically only a few miles from Brooklyn Heights and its affluent residents, culturally and economically the two neighborhoods could not have been further apart.

Matt’s converted warehouse sat at the water’s edge, next to one of Red Hook’s defunct docks. In its heyday, this area had been a thriving seaport community. While working piers still peppered the peninsula, the nautical activity was nothing compared to what it once was. And while some gentrification had taken place with the opening of a few hipster eateries and the conversion of old factories into offices for start-ups, Red Hook was still primarily “residustrial”—part residential and part industrial—with its gritty roots still evident as my car passed rusty fencing, ramshackle row houses, and a run-down auto repair shop.

After exiting the car, I crossed the cracked concrete of the narrow sidewalk and stepped onto the newly paved driveway of Matt’s property. The gate in his shiny silver chain-link fencing was open and I strode through it.

Here the view across New York Bay was very different from Addy’s. No glittering Wall Street skyscrapers, just the industrial ports of Bayonne, New Jersey, and (admittedly) a nice view of Miss Liberty, the statue where the poetry of Emma Lazarus had lifted up the poor, the wretched, the homeless, and tempest-tossed, who’d risked their lives with dreams of opening the well-heeled young poet’s “golden door.”

There were no golden doors in neighborhoods like this one, with public housing, pockmarked streets, random graffiti, and the ghosts of shantytowns past. Here is where dreamers landed and sometimes perished.

My visits to Red Hook were always reminders of the countless hard lives that ended too soon in this city, and some not far from here. Columbia Street was where they found Ace Archer’s decomposing body.

Despite the deceptively sunny sky, a salt-tinged wind whipping off the water set my skin shivering. Or maybe it was the thought of a golden-haired boy left in a vacant lot.

With a deep breath, I cleared my head, pulled out my phone, and finally replied to Matt’s text.

TWO MINUTE WARNING.

I’M OUTSIDE AND COMING IN!

Even though I had a key and the code for the security system, my warning was necessary…

After the failure of Matt’s second marriage to a powerful corporate queen bee, he made a firm decision to set up his new life not with a romantic partner but with the coffee cherries that he’d sourced around the world and stored in climate-controlled purity.

Consequently, my globe-trotting ex-husband’s NYC base camp was now the wide balcony that ran the length of his coffee warehouse, which he’d converted into an open loft apartment, complete with bedroom, bath, office, and kitchen, all of which overlooked his precious coffee beans. On the roof was a large wooden deck with a grill and lounge chairs, where he sometimes slept on a bedroll, under the stars.

None of this surprised me.

Matt would always prefer pitching a tent among the shade-grown cherries of Peru’s northern highlands or bunking with the smallholder coffee farmers of Yandaro than checking into a five-star hotel in Paris, Rome, or his New York home.

After the bitter betrayal of his status-conscious second wife, who’d dumped him when he no longer served her purposes, Matt was content to resume his confirmed bachelor status, free to hook up with whomever he wanted and “swipe right” whenever he liked, which meant he might not be alone at the moment.

Another frigid gust off the bay increased my shivering, but I was determined to give Matt the full one hundred twenty seconds to warn me off.

When time was up with no reply, I unlocked the door and pushed it open. Piercing alarm bells went off throughout the warehouse. They only fell silent after I shut the door and typed the code into the keypad.

Relieved to be inside, I began rubbing my freezing hands together in the glorious warmth when a voice startled me.

“Clare?”

I turned to find myself facing the coffee hunter who ruled this castle of caffeination—my ex-husband, dripping wet and half-naked.