Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
JAMESON
Boston, MA
Lauren
Do you have a minute?
I flip my phone over and glance at the message for the fourth time, then set the phone back facedown on the kitchen table.
“What the hell’s going on?” Jules asks as she tucks a loose strand of her blond hair behind her ear and reaches for my empty plate. “You getting another booty call? It better not be from that bitchy blonde I kicked out of here last weekend.”
“Please don’t remind me.” I swirl my glass of scotch, watching as the amber liquid coats the edges of the glass.
As I often do, I’ve poured myself a glass after dinner and I’ll sip it slowly, never drinking the whole thing.
Call it a test of my willpower, like I do, or my need to prove I’m not my father, as my therapist does—either way, there’s alcohol in front of me and I’ve still never been drunk.
“It was 4 a.m. and you were having a full-out screaming match in the hallway. You’re lucky it was me you woke up and not Audrey or Graham .
. .” Jules trails off as she carries our dishes across the antique cross-and-star-patterned terra-cotta tiled floors to the sink, not needing to finish the sentence because we both know what Graham is like—the kid is awesome, as long as he gets enough sleep.
If he doesn’t, it’s like he’s been replaced with a demonic changeling.
“We weren’t having a screaming match—she was the only one yelling. I was trying to calm her down.”
Bringing a woman back to my place is never not a mistake. Not when my two nosy sisters live downstairs and said woman wants to spend the night. Staying over is a hard no, in my book, and something I’m always upfront about.
“Yeah,” Jules says, setting the plates in the sink and turning to look at me.
“Because when in the course of human history has a woman ever been calmed by having a man tell her to calm the fuck down?” She pads across the floor in her fuzzy socks with her leggings tucked inside.
With her oversized sweatshirt hanging off one shoulder and her blond hair up in a messy bun, she looks more like a college student than the co-owner of one of Boston’s most up-and-coming construction companies. “C’mon, I raised you better than that.”
“You’re such a smart-ass.” I roll my eyes as she walks back and collapses into her chair across from me, a big smile on her face. My sisters love to throw things I once said to them, like I raised you better than that, back at me. But she’s right. I should have known better. “Won’t happen again.”
And it truly won’t. It’s just not worth the effort.
From now on, if I pick up a woman at a bar, I’m going to her place even if my place is much closer, as was the case last weekend.
That way, when I’m ready to head to my bed alone and she decides to start throwing shit, she can break her own stuff and we won’t risk waking up my family.
“So who is it?” Jules tilts her chin toward my phone. It’s taking everything I have not to pick it up and look at it a fifth time. Seeing Lauren’s name is bringing up way too many emotions.
“The wife of a client.”
“How would he feel about his wife texting you?” She could be joking, but it doesn’t really sound like it.
“Since he’s dead . . .” I shrug.
“Oh shit, Jameson.” She slaps the table. “I was teasing. Are you serious?”
I nod and then rub my fingers across my forehead, hoping the pressure will relieve some of the tension that’s building there.
“Why don’t you seem more upset?”
“Because I like him even less now that he’s dead.”
“Jeez,” Jules says. “What the hell happened?”
I can’t possibly explain my history with Lauren. How five years ago we had dinner together and everything changed between us, but the next day my whole life was flipped upside down, and then I stupidly introduced her to Josh.
How six months later they were engaged, and I cornered her at work in the middle of her going away party to tell her how disappointed I was that she was making herself small to fit into the mold of the woman Josh wanted.
How I insisted she was too fucking talented to waste her energy on becoming a Stepford Wife.
And then how it felt seeing her last weekend, a hollowed out version of herself—not because of his death, but because he’d made her that way.
She’d gone from being fierce and fiery, to completely docile.
And I hated myself for how I’d let him dull her spark, and even more for how I knew I’d do anything to bring it back.
Even if it meant burning myself in the process.
But I can’t tell Jules any of that.
“He was skiing out of bounds and got caught up in an avalanche,” I tell Jules, even though I know that’s not the answer to the question she was asking.
She doesn’t press me to elaborate, even though I can see her curiosity written across her face. “So why is she texting you?”
“Because in addition to being his agent, I am the executor of his will and trust.”
“Is that normal? Like, do you do that for all your clients?”
“No. The fact that he didn’t have a family member or close friend that he’d ask to do this, instead of me, speaks volumes.”
I swirl the scotch around in my glass before taking a small sip. Now in the latter half of my thirties, I’m finally—sort of—learning to not hate the taste.
Another text has my phone buzzing in my hand, and I glance down to see her name on my screen again.
Lauren
It’s important.
“I need to make a call,” I say to Jules, but I’m already up and heading toward the living room.
I take a seat on the arm of the sofa farthest from my sister, and turn toward the wide glass doors leading out to the very small backyard behind our brownstone.
When Lauren answers the phone, it’s with a breathy “Hello?” that has so many memories running through my mind it’s almost hard to respond.
“You okay?” The words come out sounding rougher than I intend.
She lets out a stuttered, heaving, “No?”
The fact that her response is a question has all the alarm bells going off in my mind. I lower my voice. “What’s wrong, Lauren?” God, I hate thinking of her in that huge house in the mountains, all by herself with those babies.
“I’m fine. But I’m . . . I don’t even have the words.” She’s definitely been crying, and it’s like she can’t even form a complete thought.
“Would you just tell me what’s going on?”
“I had a meeting with our financial adviser a few days ago, and one of the things I learned is that my husband had virtually no income for the past few years since he retired.”
I already knew this, so I’m tempted to ask her what other things she learned, but it’s really none of my business. “And. . .?”
“And what the fuck, Jameson? You were supposed to be managing his career. What happened to his endorsements?”
“Lauren.” The way I say her name, soft but chiding, she knows. She knows what I’m going to say next. “You know this industry. What does it take for someone to carry major endorsements into retirement?”
Silence.
“Name recognition,” she says softly. “Brand partnerships. Product endorsements.”
Josh was a well-known skier at one point in his career, but he waited to retire until his career was dwindling. And he never had the name recognition that some US skiers achieve, so when his endorsement contracts were up, most of the brands didn’t renew. He understood that’s just how it goes.
“He did have a few small endorsements, still.” But clearly not what he’d led her to believe.
“Okay, so along with that, I’ve learned a few things that don’t make sense with the trust.”
I’d read that thing cover to cover when Josh sent it to originally, and again on the plane on the way out to Utah for the funeral. It was straightforward and solid. “Like what?”
“Well, the short version is, Josh borrowed half the money for our home from his parents, then just a few months ago he took out a reverse mortgage on our house for the other half of the home value. Which means I pretty much have zero equity in this house.”
Well shit.
“And apparently we now own a house in Boston,” she says, then pauses, “well, Brookline, actually. But that house isn’t in the trust.”
“How did you figure this all out?”
She explains about finding the mortgage statement in the PO Box, then the convoluted process of reviewing their tax returns only to find out they paid property taxes on a second property, going through papers she found hidden in Josh’s office closet, and eventually tracking down the deed for a house here in Massachusetts.
“I just . . . I can’t imagine how he’d pull all the equity out of our house without telling me. Or how he used that money to buy a new house, also without telling me? Or how he did this while our house was in the trust?”
I stand and start pacing the living room because I can’t sit still while I’m talking about my former client doing something so underhanded and dishonest.
“I don’t know the ins and outs of estate law, but I’m sure it’s possible to remortgage a property that’s in a trust. The point of the trust is to protect the assets after death, not to prevent you from accessing those assets while still alive. But why would he buy a house in Boston?”
She sighs, but it isn’t an unhappy sound. “I’d been saying I wanted to move back to Boston for months. And it seems like maybe he was planning this really big surprise to give me exactly what I wanted.”
“Was Josh the type to plan a surprise this huge?”
Behind me, I hear Audrey come back from putting Graham to sleep, and she and Jules are talking in hushed tones.
“Yeah, he loved grand gestures. The bigger, the better. But this is . . . I don’t know how to explain it.
Like on the one hand, he was planning to give me what he knew I needed.
And on the other hand, there were some enormous secrets he was keeping, and that feels wrong.
” She exhales, and I can picture the tears rolling down her face.
I wonder what she means that moving to Boston was what she “needed,” but I don’t feel like it’s my place to ask, or that she’d tell me even if I did.