31. Ronan
RONAN
I wake before Cali, which isn't hard, because I never really slept. I laid there with her head pillowed on my chest most of the night, listening to her breathe, and I thought about all the things I still haven't told her.
She's asleep when the light starts to come through the windows. I watch her for a while. Her hair is a mess on the pillow. One hand is curled up near her mouth. She looks younger like this. Softer. Like nothing in the world has ever gone wrong for her.
I know better than to believe that.
After all, I helped some of it go wrong.
I slip out from beneath her and make coffee while she sleeps. When she wakes up, she pads out into the kitchen in one of my shirts. I hand her a cup, and she smiles at me, and that alone is almost enough to bring me to my knees.
"I have to get the kids," she says, halfway through the coffee.
"I know. Paolo's downstairs."
She looks at me over the rim of the cup. "You already called the car?"
"I called it when I woke up."
"You never sleep, do you?"
"Not much."
She sets the cup down and comes over and stands in front of me. She's so small and pretty in my shirt, I'm considering never letting her wear any other clothes ever again. It's either this or naked, nothing else.
"Keep looking at me like that and you're going to make me late," she laughs, but she doesn't step back.
"That's the plan."
She swats my chest, then flattens her palm over the spot she hit like she's apologizing to it.
Her fingers find the ridge of an old scar and run along it, though she doesn't ask.
It's one of a hundred small mercies she hands me without knowing she's doing it, and every one of them is a stone in my shoe.
Tell her, you bastard.
"Cali…" I start.
"Mm?" She's ducking back into the bedroom now to change into her clothes. She reemerges a moment later with her shoes in one hand.
Tell her. Say it. Just fucking spit it out.
But the words won't come.
"Nothing," I say instead. "Go get your gremlins."
She kisses me once, quick, tasting of coffee, and heads for the door. I watch her go and despise the coward in my chest who let her.
Next weekend at the lake. I'll tell her then.
When she's gone, I sit and stew in the quiet of the apartment. It's always quiet, but now, it's worse, because she was just in it, and now, she's not. I stand at the glass and look out at the park.
Then I make a decision.
Navi picks up almost right away. "You're up early for a man who was busy last night."
"How do you know I was busy?"
"I didn't, I was just fishing. Thanks for confirming."
I roll my eyes in irritation. But I didn't call to shoot the shit. "Navi," I say, "I need you to kill it."
There's a pause on the other end. "Kill what?"
"The Meadows deal. The Bradshaw Holdings paperwork. All of it. Kill it."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"You want to walk me through what you mean by 'kill it'?"
"I mean I don't want it anymore. The company. Her company. I don't want to take it."
"Ronan…"
"I'll find another way. I'll bring in someone new to do what Pyotr did, train them properly this time. I'll buy a legitimate business from someone who wants to sell one. I'll do it slower and cleaner. But I'm not taking hers."
"Do you understand what you're saying, man?" he asks in slow-dawning horror.
"As a matter of fact," I spit, "I understand exactly what I'm saying."
"You've spent months on this!" he protests. "It's practically at the finish line. What happened to 'this is the answer to everything'?"
"It was the answer. It's not anymore. I found a better one.”
"Which is what?"
I look out at the park. "Anything that isn't this."
In the background, I hear him light up an anxious cigarette. The click and rasp of the lighter, the crackle of his inhale. "Care to fill in the class on what changed?"
"Nothing," I grunt, knowing full well that he'll never let me get away with that much of a vague, evasive non-answer.
"This is an expensive choice," he says.
"I don't give a fuck. Whatever it costs, I'll eat it. I don't care about the money."
He sighs. "You're killing me, man. Just… goddammit, give me a few hours," he says. "Let me talk to some people. Then I'll call you back."
"Navi—"
"A few hours," he interrupts. "Let me do my job. You want it killed, I'll figure out how to kill it. But I'm not going to just pull the plug and hope for the best."
"Fine," I say. "A few hours."
I hang up…
And smile.
It's dead. There are no more lies.
There's just the possibility of a wide-open future.
I try to work. I have real work to do, of the legal variety. This is the work that keeps the lights on so the rest of it can happen in the dark. So, even though I don't want to go into the office, I get dressed and make the trek.
I then proceed to sit at the desk and daydream. There are files open in front of me, but my eyes pass over them dozens of times without processing a single word of their content.
Instead of the files, I see the lake.
It's not a hard picture to conjure. The dock, the old rope swing dangling from the tree.
Hayden would love that dock. He'd want to know how deep the water gets, whether there are fish, what kind, and I'd have to look up the answers on my phone because I don't have the faintest clue what swims in a lake in the Catskills.
But I'd do it. I'd learn the Latin names just so I'd have something to delight him with.
Isabella would want the shoebox to come along. Doctor Fuzz, weekend guest of honor. She'd insist the caterpillar needs to see the water, and I'd carry the box down to the shore myself and hold it up so the brave little creature could take in the view.
And Cali. Cali on the dock in the late twilight, her hair loose, no mirror in a hundred miles for her to shrink in front of. Just the water throwing her reflection back, soft and gold.
I've never wanted anything so simple so badly in my life.
I keep picturing telling her what I almost did.
I decided I'm going to do it, and I've only gotten more sure of it since. After the weekend. I'll take them up to the lake, I'll give them three good days, and then, when it's just the two of us on the dock and the kids are asleep, I'll tell her.
Not everything. Not the parts that would put her in danger just for knowing them.
But enough so that she understands what I am.
That way, when the ugly parts of my life come knocking someday—and they will, they always do—she isn't blindsided by them.
But I intend to do it right, so that she never looks at me and sees another Todd, a man who smiled to her face and did his damage behind her back.
I owe her that.
All that remains is for Navi to call me back and tell me it's done.
He calls back a little after noon. "You want the good news or the bad news?"
"That depends. Is there any good news?"
"Not really. I was being polite."
I stand up and go to the window. "Tell me."
"I talked to a few people. Smart people. And they all said the same thing, independently, without talking to each other. You want to hear it?"
"That's why I'm on the phone, Navi."
"Long story short: It's too late to stop it."
I feel a sudden, graveyard chill race through me. "Explain yourself," I demand in a voice that sounds eerily like my father's.
Navi swallows. "You remember the query I told you about? The outside party who pulled a filing on one of the shells? Well, turns out they're still digging around. They pulled a second document Thursday. We still don't know who they are. But they're looking."
"So we clean the mess. That's what the tool was for."
"Duh," he says sarcastically. "And to clean the mess, we need the tool, which means we need the company, which is the whole point of the deal you just told me to kill."
"And I told you to find another way."
"Look, Ro, I'd love to. But even if there was another way—which, to be clear, I don't think there is—resorting to that now would throw up red flags. An aborted filing raises eyebrows if the wrong people catch wind of it. The last thing we need is more attention being paid to us."
I close my eyes and let my forehead fall against the glass window of my office.
Fuck.
I built this contraption, and I know how these things read from the outside. For those with the ears to listen, the story hidden inside a sudden, unexplained reversal is, Someone got scared. Look here. Start asking serious questions.
"So what are you telling me?" I say. "That I have to take it?"
"I'm telling you that stopping now is more dangerous than finishing. The safest thing is to let it run its course. We transfer the ownership from her to us, like planned, nice and boring, nice and routine. Nothing to see. And once it's done and it's quiet and the trail is cold—"
I cut him off. "Then I'll give it back to her."
He hesitates. "That's… one option. I guess. Theoretically."
I'm nodding, trying my damndest to convince myself that this is still a moral route to take.
I'm not stealing from her; I'm simply… borrowing, with the full intent of returning what's rightfully hers to her as soon as it's safe to do so.
That's not a lie. That's not anything. Merely shuffling paperwork.
"How long will that take?"
"How long will what take?" he asks, perplexed.
"How long until I can give it back? Until it's cold. Until it's safe."
"I don't know. A few months at least. Maybe longer. Depends on who's looking and how long they keep looking. I'm not going to lie to you and give you a number I can't back up."
"Don't lie to me. Ever. I have enough of that going around."
"I'm not lying. I'm telling you I don't know. What more do you want from me, Ronan?"
I let out a long breath. It fogs the glass and then fades.
"Then that's what we do," I say. "Finish the deal, do what must be done. But the second the trail is cold—the very second, Navi, not one day later—I give it back to her."
"I'll set it up so it's ready to reverse the moment you say go."
"Do that."
"But, Ronan…"
I pause halfway to hanging up. "What?"
"She's not going to like this if she ever finds out. I know you think you're doing the right thing, and I don't really disagree. But I can't imagine her feeling the same way."
My fist goes white-knuckled around the phone in my grasp. "No one fucking asked you," I lash out. "Just do your job."
He sighs. "That's what I've always done for you, cousin. Always have, always will."
"Good. Keep doing that." I feel guilty, but I'm in no mood for his lectures.
I have a plan, and that plan is to tell her once it's all settled. There's no point in stirring the pot before then. I'm not a liar. I'm not a fucking liar.
I'm simply doing what must be done.