of ‘em,” finished Oscar Glover, one of Eastefire’s senior executives. His belly hung far over his belt and his teeth had yellowed long ago. He took a long drag on his cigar and sent a plume of smoke to the ceiling. “I never slept so well.”
The rest of the men in the room erupted in laughter. Only Blake remained quiet, cigar in one hand, empty highball glass in the other. Oscar looked over. “What’s-a matter, Blake? Never had two pussies at once?” He laughed again. “You’re missing out.”
Blake forced a smile and set his glass on the sideboard near the fireplace. Six men from Eastefire, upper executives who’d been with the company almost longer than Blake had been alive, lounged in the private study of Warren Carter’s home, an enormous eighteenth-century Colonial set behind wrought-iron gates in the suburb of Brookline.
Growing up, Blake had watched these men come and go almost every Sunday night. He’d listened to their laughter behind closed doors, smelled thick cigar smoke, and wished he could join them. Power existed in this room, he imagined. Business deals were brokered and decisions were made that affected hundreds of people and made millions of dollars.
Once he’d finally been invited inside, he realized how wrong he’d been.
They rarely talked business. Oh, once in a while they started out discussing a deal, but the details usually included which smaller company they’d screwed over in the process or which office assistant had the best tits. They’d talk politics at length, but the conversations were limited to which current senator was open to bribes or which would cut excessive business regulations. A picture of Ronald Reagan hung over the fireplace, and Warren often raised a glass to it when he heralded the good old days of deregulation.
There’d be general chest-thumping in response, more cigars, more scotch, and the stories would fast devolve into who had screwed which intern this week while the wife was out of town – for those who were married, anyway. Most were on their second or third marriage, or single, except for Warren.
“My son’s got a lot on his mind this week.”
Blake’s thoughts returned to the study. He put his lips to his cigar. He wasn’t a smoking man, but the taste of a good Cuban was the only thing that made these nights bearable. He’d returned from Drake Isle earlier that afternoon, but he already missed it. The air, the sun, the simplicity, Emmy.
“Oh, yeah?” Oscar said. “And why’s that?” He blew more smoke up at the ceiling. “The Drake Isle deal giving you a run for your money?”
Blake cut a glance at his father. “Just putting up more of a fight than I thought,” he said. “It won’t be a problem.”
“Course it won’t,” Warren said. “Blake’s my number-one deal closer.” He gave a satisfied nod and refilled his glass. He held out the decanter, but Blake shook his head. “Now let’s talk about the goddamn ball next weekend. Who’s going? Les?”
The lawyer nodded. “Not sure I’ll make it past all the speeches, but I’ll be there. Myrna told me I better put on my dancing shoes.”
The men chuckled. “How’s your other nephew doing?” asked Connor Watkins. “He get himself a job?”
“Working on it, or so he tells us.” Les shook his head. “It’s amazing how two boys from the same parents can end up so differently. When we took them in, Nikolas was the one who needed comfort. He slept on a cot in our room for six months. But not his brother. He kept to himself. We figured he was the quiet one, healing in his own way after his parents died.” He swallowed the last of his drink. “He’s always been a little distant. But he’s back in Boston now, and that’s a good thing, I think, being closer to us.” He glanced at Blake. “I try not to be too hard on him for following a different drummer. Or being his own drummer, I guess.”
Blake smiled. He admired Les. Raising two pre-teens after his own sister died couldn’t have been easy. Les knew about loss and hardship, had experienced it in spades, but he hadn’t ended up nearly the prick that Warren had. Blake often thought he had more in common with Les than his own father. We both care about people, not just profits.
“Cheers to that.” Matteo, a full-blooded Italian who’d overseen Eastefire’s international deals for the last two decades, sucked on his own cigar. “I’m takin’ Sylvie to the ball, too. Gotta kiss up to Christos Angelopoulos, and those types love talking to my wife. She could tell ‘em to run naked through Boston Gardens and they’d ask her if she preferred in summer or winter.” He guffawed. “Shit, I love my wife. Finally got it right the third time around.”
“Christos was just elected ambassador to Greece, yes?” Warren asked.
“Damn straight.”
Blake tuned out as the conversation turned to the other dignitaries who’d be at the DeVeau Ball and who at Eastefire would corner which one to grease palms. None of the men noticed as he slipped out and walked to the kitchen. Despite the chill in the rest of the house, that room was the one place that actually felt like home.
“Mom?”
Julia Carter stood at the counter rolling dough. “Hi, sweetheart. Had enough?”
“Yes.” He wrapped his arms around her from behind and kissed her neck. “How do you put up with it?”
She smiled. “Thirty-four years of practice.” She pinched the edges of the crust in front of her. “And lots of baking.”
Blake pulled off his jacket and tossed it onto the back of a chair. They’d never eaten in this room, only in the dining room down the hall, which sat sixteen. But the kitchen and his own third-floor getaway were the only places in the eighteen thousand-square foot house he could bear.
“What’s on your mind?” Julia set the crust into a pie pan and turned on the oven.
“Not much.”
“I didn’t believe that when you were in high school, and I’m not believing it now.” She wiped her hands on her apron and sat beside him at the table. “Your father giving you a hard time?”
“When does he not?”
She patted his hand. “You know he loves you. In his own very complicated way.”
“So you say.”
She frowned. “I don’t like to hear that. I do say, because it’s true. Do you think for one minute you’d be running this company if he didn’t think you could handle it? If he didn’t believe in you?”
Blake didn’t answer. That doesn’t mean he loves me. It just means he respects my M.B.A. and wants a Carter at the helm.
“I know you’ll say that doesn’t mean he loves you.” She pressed her palm to her chest. “I know he does. Just because he doesn’t say it, doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it.”
Blake rubbed the back of his neck. He had a fifteen-minute train ride home and the clock over the stove read ten-thirty. Sometimes he stayed over on Sunday nights, but tonight all he wanted was his own bed. His own thoughts.
“What else is bothering you?”
He folded his arms on the table. “Do you remember Emmy Doyle? From college?”
“Of course. Why?”
“She owns a building on Drake Isle that Eastefire wants to buy.”
“Ah. How do you feel about that?”
Like shit. Like I’m all tied up in a ball inside. “It’s complicated,” he finally said.
“Of course it is.” She paused. “How is Emmy? I always liked her.”
“She’s doing okay. I mean, for the most part. Her mom passed away a few months ago. Cancer. And now a multi-million-dollar company is trying to buy her out. Other than that, you know...” He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course. Anything at all.”
“Did Emmy send me a letter here after college?”
She thought for a moment. “In the mail, you mean? I don’t think so. I never saw one that I can recall. I didn’t know people your age even wrote letters anymore. That’s something from my generation.” She stood and picked up her rolling pin again.
“She said she did because, you know, with everything that happened, we weren’t supposed to be using our phones, and Dad was so all over me about things...” He trailed off, not sure what he was trying to say. “I never got it, that’s all. And I wondered.”
“You can ask your father, but he usually left the mail to Geraldine, and she always put everything on the table in the hallway.”
Geraldine was a scrupulous house cleaner that had worked for the Carters for almost twenty years. Blake doubted she’d misplace so much as an advertising flyer from the local laundromat. Maybe Emmy’s letter had never arrived here at all.
A door slammed down the hall, and a moment later they could hear the guests’ drunken voices fading. Cars started up, because the men always insisted on driving themselves home. Julia crossed herself the way she always did too, whispering a prayer that they wouldn’t kill themselves or anyone else on the way.
The oven dinged. “Sweetie, I’ve got to get this in. I’m dropping off a half-dozen pies tomorrow for the Ladies’ Auxiliary bake sale, and I still have two more to make tonight.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’re sure you’re okay? Do you want to talk about it? About Emmy?”
He shook his head. There was nothing and everything to say. Once he started, he probably wouldn’t be able to stop. He kissed her on the cheek and walked back out into the enormous foyer. Carrara marble tile flown in from Italy. Commissioned paintings of five generations of Carter men. An authentic Turkish carpet and a full-size reproduction of Michelangelo’s David. It felt more like a museum than a house.
“There you are.” Blake’s father stood in the doorway of the study, two full glasses of scotch in his hands. “Here. Bottoms up.”
The back of Blake’s neck tightened. He’d never get home tonight, not at this rate. And it wouldn’t do any good to resist his father’s offer with everyone else gone. His best bet was to drink fast, claim he had to do some work before hitting the sheets, and then vanish upstairs to his childhood bedroom. He could take the first train home tomorrow. On Memorial Day, anyway, no one would expect him in the office.
“You disappeared,” Warren said as they sat in the two leather chairs that flanked the fireplace. The temperature, a cool sixty-eight despite the heavy air outside, gave Blake goosebumps. He wished he hadn’t left his jacket in the kitchen.
“Sorry. Wanted to say hi to Mom.”
“Of course.” Warren took a sip of scotch. “This is harder for you than I thought it would be, isn’t it? The Drake Isle deal.”
Well, what did you think? It would be a fucking piece of cake? Blake swallowed nearly half his scotch. “It’s a little tricky, what with it being Emmy and all.”
Warren nodded. A tiny muscle below his right eye twitched. He crossed one leg over the other. “You’re aware that the Delta suspension is lifted as of the end of the summer?”
Blake nodded.
“There’ll be a formal re-dedication ceremony on the island. Two reps from the national office in Georgia are coming up for it.”
“Uh huh.”
Warren frowned. “Are you being deliberately unresponsive? Or do you not care?”
“What do you want me to say? I know all of this. I got a letter in the mail.”
“So you’ll be going to the ceremony?”
“Of course not.”
Warren’s face turned to thunder. “Why the hell not?”
Blake tightened his fingers around the glass. It took everything he had not to fling the remnants of his drink into his father’s face. “I don’t know, Dad. Maybe because you made it perfectly clear that I was one of the reasons the fraternity was suspended in the first place? That whole weekend is gonna be a clusterfuck of people dredging up all the things that happened the spring we got closed down.” He almost added that he’d already taken a fist to the jaw by a guy who blamed him for the whole thing. “I don’t exactly have good memories of Misterion.”
His father drew in a long breath. His nostrils flared. The grandfather clock ticked in echoing madness as they sat there in silence, facing off. Finally Warren spoke. “We have a family legacy on the island that goes back two hundred years.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you aware that Delta Eta Chi could’ve been closed down for good? That I managed to get a suspension instead, after a girl died under your watch, is a goddamn miracle.”
Blake leapt to his feet.
“Don’t you dare walk out of this room.”
“Then don’t tell me I was the one responsible for Piper’s death. It wasn’t ‘my watch.’ I wasn’t stationed on top of the roof to keep an eye on people. And don’t tell me you single-handedly saved the fraternity. I didn’t ask you to come. I could’ve handled it myself.”
“That girl died while you were president. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t know she was up there, didn’t push her, didn’t find her. It happened at the Delta house.” Warren’s face grew red. “You were the leader of the Delta house. As I was, and my grandfather was, and his uncle was, and his father and grandfather before them.”
“I don’t need a history lesson.” Blake slammed his glass on the sideboard.
“I think maybe you do.” Warren headed him off at the door. “I’m not sure you have a sense of the gravity of the situation.”
“The gravity? The fucking gravity? I lost everything that night. How dare you –”
But to Blake’s surprise, Warren put a hand on Blake’s arm. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...” He took a deep breath. “I still get worked up when I think about it. It was a terrible, horrible thing. Unthinkable. I know what you lost.”
Blake didn’t move. He couldn’t remember the last time his father had touched him on purpose, and despite everything inside him that told him to get the hell out of that room, he couldn’t.
“You are my son. I wanted to do what I could to protect the Delta name, of course, but more important than that was protecting you. Everything I did after that tragedy was to make sure you didn’t get hurt.”
“Is that why you threw out Emmy’s letter?” Blake didn’t know what possessed him to ask the question, but as soon as he saw the look on his father’s face, he knew he’d guessed the truth. “You did, didn’t you? You got it before Mom or Geraldine and you threw it out.”
“No.” But Warren’s expression faltered. “I didn’t throw it out. I saw it in the mailbox, yes. And I put it away. I didn’t think you needed to read anything from her so soon after everything happened.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make.”
“I meant to give it to you later on, after the dust had settled.”
“But you didn’t.”
Warren swallowed the remainder of his drink and set his glass aside. “No, I didn’t. By the end of the summer, you’d started at Harvard and were finally acting like yourself again, and I thought the last thing you needed was to be dragged back into the past. And then, to be frank, I forgot about it.”
“Where is it? Do you still have it?”
Warren blinked. “I think I put it in my center desk drawer. But that was before we had this room redone.”
They both looked at the desk that currently sat beside the fireplace, a massive antique that had arrived from France a couple of years ago. After a particularly robust third quarter at Eastefire, Warren had redecorated most of the first floor.
“So it’s gone,” Blake said in a quiet voice.
“Probably. I didn’t clean out the drawers before we sold it. I didn’t remember that I’d stored anything important in there.”
Of course not. Just the missing pieces of my heart. “I can’t believe this.”
“Son, I’m sorry. Maybe it was the wrong decision to make. I didn’t do it to be malicious. I wanted to protect you, that’s all. You’re all I have left.”
Blake’s gaze slid to the photograph that hung behind Warren’s chair. In it, seven-year-old Samuel Carter wore a Little League uniform, a glove in one hand, a gap-toothed smile on his face. Two days after that picture had been taken, a drunk driver had jumped the curb and killed Sam.
“Every Carter in this family has made mistakes and lost things along the way,” Warren said quietly. “But we have always risen again, stronger than before. We have triumphed and succeeded, and I want you to remember that.”
Tears pricked Blake’s eyes. He’d been five when Sam was killed, old enough to cry for his brother but not nearly old enough to understand the legacy he’d been left as the only son in the family. That came much later.
“Think about going to the reunion, if only to prove to everyone that you triumphed, that Delta Eta Chi remains and always will. We are salt-of-the-earth survivors, Blake.” His voice grew gruff. “Through all the shit this world hands us, we survive.” He clapped Blake on the back. “I’m proud of you, son. Look at what you’ve done, what you’ve become with the company, and younger than I did. CEO at thirty-two? That’s a goddamn achievement. I’m proud of you every day. I know I never say that, and I should, but I am.”
Blake stood there staring at the picture of Sam. His head spun. Proud? He stuffed his hands inside his pockets as a lump rose in his throat. For most of his life, he’d ached to hear those words. Everything he’d done in high school and college and business school, every touchdown he scored, every deal he brought to his father’s desk, came from trying to fill his dead brother’s shoes, to live up to the impossible expectations of a rigid, unyielding father. He couldn’t undo the past. He couldn’t bring back Samuel or erase the black mark of a suspension from the family fraternity’s history.
But when it came to business, when it came to Eastefire and the success of the family company, Blake could definitely deliver. He was a Carter.
“I’ll do whatever I can to get the Drake Isle property,” he said, chin lifted. “I promise, Dad. I promise.”