Chapter 7
Seven
John Smith was a fraud. To the outside world he was fun-loving Smitty, a persona he had worked so hard to perfect over the years he almost believed it himself.
Anything was better than the truth—that he had grown up in Newport all right, just not in the part of town they featured in the tourist brochures.
Sometimes it was hard to believe how far he had come from the housing projects.
The son of James King, the richest man in America, was one of Smitty’s best friends.
Apparently, he had managed to impress James, and when James turned over the management of his personal fortune to Smitty, he had single-handedly guaranteed Smitty’s partnership at the brokerage house.
He made his first million by the time he was thirty-two, and thanks to James and his referrals, he was closing in on his sixth million at thirty-seven.
Looking out at the lights of Manhattan from the bedroom of his gleaming twenty-second-floor co-op, he felt like a total failure.
He never talked about his childhood in the ghetto with a cocaine-addicted mother and a revolving series of “uncles” who only kept their hands off Smitty because he was bigger than most of them.
What they paid his mother for sex fed her addiction.
One of them had fathered him, but she had no idea which one.
She hadn’t even loved him enough to give him a decent name.
Instead he was stuck with the most boring, nondescript name in the world.
People often didn’t believe him when he told them his name was John Smith, thus the creation of Smitty.
Even his three closest friends had no idea what his life had been like as he had scratched and clawed his way to an academic scholarship at Princeton.
For the last five summers, Smitty had returned weekly to his hometown where he assumed his mother still lived.
But he never saw her, never called her, and never thought of her except when these fits of pensiveness struck, usually when things were going a little too well.
He wondered if she ever thought about him.
Would she be pleased to know what he had done with his life?
What he had made of himself? Would she allow her son to improve her circumstances or would she snort whatever money he gave her up her nose?
What would happen to the life he had so carefully cultivated if the people in his world ever found out about where he came from?
Would James still trust him to manage his vast portfolio?
Would Parker, Chip, and Ted, all of them from prominent, respected families, still think of him as a brother if they knew he was the bastard son of a drug-addicted prostitute?
The luckiest day of his life had occurred at the start of his sophomore year at Princeton when he had been assigned to live with Ted and found Chip and Parker next door.
They thought his parents were dead. Years ago he had shown them a big pretty house in Newport and told them he had lived there as a kid.
They had believed him. Why wouldn’t they?
What would his lies do to his nearly twenty-year friendship with the three men who meant more to him than anyone in the world?
Their families had become his family. In particular, Smitty loved Mitzi and Lillian Duffy with a passion, and when people asked about his family, he thought of them.
On Mother’s Day, it was Mitzi and Lillian who received two-dozen pink roses from him—not the cokehead hooker who had given birth to him.
An economics degree from Princeton, a Wharton MBA, and a few million in the bank had put some pedigree between him and his shameful past, but it hadn’t been enough to keep his wife around.
Cherie had left him when he told her the truth three years into their marriage.
She couldn’t live with someone who lied, she said on her way out the door, but not before he saw the revulsion on her face.
His friends thought he had pulled the plug on the marriage, and Smitty let them think he’d been as glad to see her go as they were.
John, on the other hand, had been devastated by the loss of his wife and had vowed to never again give anyone that kind of power over him.
And then along came Caroline and away went all his resolve to protect his heart.
Would she leave him too if she knew? Smitty turned away from the window and went over to where she slept in his big bed, her injured ankle propped on a pile of pillows, her arm curled over her head.
Pretty pink lips were slightly open as she breathed through her mouth.
She had kicked off the sheet, and the T-shirt of his that she had worn to bed had ridden up to her waist, giving him an unobstructed view of her spectacular, toned legs.
His heart contracted. He loved her but knew she didn’t love him—not the way he wanted her to, not yet anyway.
Time, he told himself. Give it some time.
They had only been together for a little over a month, and she thought he was too wounded from his failed marriage to commit to anyone else.
That’s what he wanted everyone to think.
It was better they not know how much he yearned for a wife who loved him, a real home, and children he could shower with everything he’d never had.
Every day he went to work, played the market, hedged his bets, and built a small fortune as a down payment on the future he so desperately wanted.
He leaned over to brush the hair back from Caroline’s forehead. In every fantasy he’d had lately about that future, she played the starring role. Somehow he had to make her see that she belonged with him.
Her eyes fluttered open. “Can’t sleep again?” she whispered in a sleepy voice, holding out her hand to bring him down next to her on the bed.
He kissed each of her fingers. “No.”
“I don’t know how you function on so little sleep.”
He shrugged. Insomnia was nothing new. The worries and fears he managed to keep at arm’s length during the day tended to come home to roost in the dark of night.
Caroline reached for him, and he sank into her embrace.
Her fingers worked the kinks from his neck and shoulders. “So carefree, yet so full of tension. Why is that?”
“It’s because I’m trying to keep my hands off your injured bod,” he joked, dodging the question that struck too close to the truth.
She studied him with knowing eyes, making him feel like she could almost see inside of him. Would she like what she saw if she discovered who he really was?
He kissed her forehead. “Go back to sleep.”