Chapter 6 – Adrian
ADRIAN
I can’t sleep at all anymore. I haven’t been able to since Cora walked in on me with Delaney. I’m having nightmares about the kidnapping again.
I was eleven when it happened. Mom had already packed up for a new life in Europe. The guys weren’t professionals. It was a crime of opportunity. Dad had been flashing cash around the wrong people, cash he’d probably immediately lost at a poker table.
The kidnappers locked me in a pitch-black basement for four days. They gave me a gallon jug of water and a bucket to shit in and left me there. I thought I’d die down there. They didn’t come back. Apparently, Dad dithered, and I escaped before any money exchanged hands.
I ended up busting through the door with a hunk of concrete I found buried in the dirt floor.
I was pretty dehydrated by then. I spent a few days in the hospital, expecting my mom to show up every time a person came through the door.
She didn’t come. Dad told me she was too busy fucking some ski instructor named Sven.
I honestly don’t know if Dad even called her.
For years, I had nightmares about that basement several times a week. I’d do anything to avoid going to bed. When I was a kid, I played video games until I crashed out in my chair. When I was older, I worked myself to the point where I’d pass out at my desk.
The nightmares got better when I got together with Cora. She’s the first woman I ever slept with overnight. There was something in her presence that made me sleep deep enough that if I dreamed, I didn’t know it.
She smells good, and she’s warm, but all women are. She sleeps pretty well herself, but if she senses a threat—if there’s a footstep in the hall or a siren in the distance—she shoots straight up in bed, instantly awake. I think that’s what lets me relax.
I could ask Farhadi for a prescription, but I don’t like the idea of being incapacitated. Logan’s company, MadDox, is the best of the best, and I spared no expense on securing the property, but still, I don’t want to be drugged with a wife and small children in the house.
I pour myself a whiskey and collapse into the chair behind my desk. I usually work in the library at night, but I need some space from the site of my most recent skirmish with Cora, so I’ve retired to my office.
Cora and the girls are down for the count.
Cora wasn’t when I carried her upstairs—she was faking—but I checked after my shower, and she was snoring softly, still curled in a ball.
I guess it’s something that she didn’t startle awake when I checked on her.
Her subconscious, at least, doesn’t see me as a threat.
After I shoot the whiskey, I pour myself another. It was good thinking to bring the bottle to my desk.
Cora’s feet are looking a lot better. Farhadi said they’re fine. I still don’t have a clear understanding of what happened.
Schmidt said he was in the other room with the kids. Tiller said she dropped a glass and stepped on it. But how did she get glass in the soles of both feet? Was she running? From what? Tiller said he didn’t see the moment she was injured, but why not? He was in the kitchen with her.
Logan was with me when I called them in, glowering and looking like a pirate with that scar he’s got, but neither Schmidt nor Tiller are easily intimidated.
They were exactly the kind of guys you want watching your family.
I wish I hadn’t needed to fire them, but Tiller’s time was up the second he grabbed Cora’s hand in that elevator.
Schmidt was cooked when he didn’t file an incident report after Cora got hurt.
That woman Pence is done, too. Cora ran circles around her, and somehow managed to come back in Gideon’s car. The Rennard is MIA. Apparently, Cora gave it to the ambulance chaser as a retainer.
Drake Chambers. That can’t be his real name. No one at Nicolet and Burgess has heard of him. Logan is looking into him now. Chambers better pray he’s buried his skeletons deep enough.
I’m actually not that angry about the Rennard. It was a bad choice for a family vehicle. I’ll call the buying service tomorrow and have them get Cora something more sedate. Maybe a Volvo.
Earlier, when I carried her upstairs, she had her pockets shoved full of what felt like rocks.
I guess she cleared her jewelry out of the safe.
Is she going to try and hock it? She’s not going to get anywhere near a fair price unless she goes to Sotheby’s or Christie’s.
If she’s never heard of Gordon Schwartz, what are the odds she knows Sotheby’s?
I’ll tell her at breakfast that her card is reactivated. It was heavy-handed of me—done in a fit of pique when Pence called—but like hell was I going to pay for my wife’s divorce lawyer.
We’re not getting a divorce. She just needs to let me know she’s angry. Soon enough, she’ll feel like she’s made her point, and things will get back to normal.
Cora doesn’t want to be at odds with me. She wants to be protected. Cared for. Guided.
Reaching into my bottom drawer, I take out the file my investigator compiled when I first met Cora. I didn’t use MadDox for the job. I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to take things with her, and I didn’t want the added noise of my brothers’ opinions.
I open the file. On the left are Cora’s school pictures.
She has one for every year until fifth grade, when she entered foster care after her grandmother died.
Starting in middle school, there are several missing—sixth grade, eighth, eleventh, and twelfth.
She gained weight each year, too, until by high school, she didn’t look much like the blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl she’d been, especially with the bad dye jobs.
She went through all the colors of the rainbow.
On the right side of the file are copies of her birth certificate, with no father listed, and her mother’s death certificate.
Her mother died of a heroin overdose when Cora was an infant.
It was probably for the best. Her grandmother seemed to have been a stable influence.
Pam Jenkins worked for thirty years as a toll operator, but she retired when she got custody of Cora in order to care for her full time.
Pam is probably where Cora learned to be such an attentive mother.
It’s clear that Pam gave Cora a solid foundation in life.
Cora’s grades were never good, either before or after Pam’s death, but her attendance and behavior were exemplary.
She got a job at a fast-food restaurant as soon as she was eligible for a work permit, and she rose in the ranks to assistant manager by the time the investigator lost track of her a few months before she showed up in New York.
I was always surprised that Cora didn’t work in childcare in Baltimore. She’s such a natural. I suppose she took the job that was offered to her. She’s a practical person. That’s another reason I married her.
There is no way that she didn’t understand our arrangement.
If she somehow managed to convince herself that this was a Cinderella story when we were dating, the reality was laid out for her in detail in the prenup, and she initialed each clause.
Why is she acting like she got hit by a bus out of nowhere?
On a whim, I pick up the phone and dial Logan. He answers on the second ring.
“Talk to me,” he says.
That’s Logan. Born ready.
“Did you run a background check on Cora when we got together?”
Logan takes a beat before he answers. “If I say yes, are you gonna kick my ass?”
I figured as much. Logan is a security guy to his bones. No one gets close to our family without vetting, not after the experience he had with that bitch in college who tried to ruin his life.
“In the report my investigator did, there’s a six-month gap from the spring of Cora’s senior year until the fall when she comes to New York.”
Logan grunts. “I just pulled up our report. I’m looking at it now.”
“What do you have for that time period?”
“What do you suspect?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Just check for me.”
I hear a series of mouse clicks through the phone. “Her name’s not listed in her high school’s graduation program. No pay stubs after March of that year. That must be when she dropped out. She was probably rotting in bed, as they say.”
“You don’t think it’s strange that she just disappeared for six months?”
“Do you?”
I let out a long exhale. What am I doing here? Looking for an answer in her past as to why she’s pissed that she caught another woman riding my cock? It’s not a mystery. We all have our pride.
“Cora walked in on me the other day. I had, uh—Delaney and I were fucking.”
Logan whistles. “Your CFO? The redhead?”
“My director of finance.”
He whistles again. “I didn’t know things were so bad at home.”
“They’re not.”
“They aren’t?”
“Well, they are now, but Cora and I were fine.”
“So you were fucking Delaney for what? Variety? I thought you wanted the wife and kids.”
“I do.”
“Funny way to show it.”
“I don’t need you busting my balls.”
“No, you need me to what—get some kind of leverage over your wife so she doesn’t leave your ass? What are we doing here?”
I blow out another breath. “I don’t know. She’s angry. Not like Mom. She’s angry and quiet.”
“That’s what I don’t get. You saw what Dad’s cheating did to Mom. It drove her crazy. What are you doing? If you want to fuck around, you’re smart enough not to get caught.”
He has a point. It was such a strange night. I didn’t set out to get laid. It just happened.
No, that’s not quite right. It was like I was watching it happen. Like I was rubbernecking my own life. I could’ve stopped at any point. Said no to the nightcap. Told Delaney to put her clothes back on when she let her dress fall to the floor.
But I didn’t.
“I don’t know,” I confess. It was a bad move.
“Are you that hot for Delaney? I got to tell you, man, it wouldn’t be an upgrade in my opinion. I don’t think she’s stepmother material.”
“I was just busting a nut. I have no interest in splitting up with Cora.”
“Again, funny way to show it.”
“You do know that you’re not helpful in the least.”
Logan snorts and then gentles his tone. “Adrian, man, I don’t know how to tell you this, but from my point of view, it really looks like you’re trying to blow up your life.
You wanted the sweet little wife and the two point five kids, and you got it.
I’m no shrink, but this is obvious self-sabotage. ”
“Yeah, I got it all right. I got what I paid for.” There’s a bitterness in my voice that I don’t recognize. I pour myself another shot and down it, savoring the burn.
“What does that mean?”
“Come on, man, what do you think it means? I’m almost forty. She’s twenty-six. You should see the prenup she signed, and she didn’t push back at all. She was so eager to nail me down.”
“You wanted her to fight you on it?”
“Not at the time.”
“Dude, you’re a fucking mess, do you know that?” Logan chuckles.
“Says the man who’s spent twelve years chasing down the one who got away.”
“Sounds like I’m not alone anymore. In fairness, though, I got played. You shot yourself in the foot.”
I’ve drunk enough that I don’t argue the point. “Just do me a favor. Look again. Dig a little deeper. Find out what Cora was doing during those months before she showed up in New York.”
“You sure you want to know?”
“No.” I’m not sure of anything right now. What I’m doing or why or how I’m going to make things go back to the way they were. “But look anyway.”
“Anything for you, brother.”
“Same.”
“Try to sleep.”
“You, too.” We both hang up, knowing neither of us is likely to get a wink.
I polish off the bottle and turn on my laptop, filing emails as I sober up. When dawn breaks, and the sun peeks through my office curtains, I’m at inbox zero, my chest burns, and my eyeballs feel like sandpaper.
The staff’s soft footsteps sound in the hall as they start their day, preparing my breakfast, bringing my car around. A new alert pops up on my phone. My last trade went through. I’ve made the family another cool five million.
My gorgeous wife and healthy, happy children are asleep in their beds. I have it all, and Logan was right.
I blew it all up on a whim.