Ruined By Moreau (Moreau Brothers #1)

Chapter 1 The Debt

The door was unlocked.

My father never left the door unlocked.

I had three things about my father filed away before I turned eighteen.

The first: he was charming in a way that cost things — rooms lit up when he walked in, bills went unpaid for weeks after.

The second: he loved me in the only way he knew how — inconsistently, and always too late.

The third: he owed people. Always people. Always more than he could repay.

I catalogued exits out of habit. Front exit, back exit, the window above the kitchen sink I'd oiled twice a year since we moved in. I knew the distance from every room to safety.

This time, the exit wasn't going to matter.

I stood in the hallway for three seconds, long enough to set the groceries down quietly, to slip off my shoes so they wouldn't announce me, to register the low murmur of voices inside.

Two of them. My father's, reedy with the kind of careful calm that meant he was terrified. And another I didn't recognize.

Low. Unhurried.

The voice of someone who'd never needed to raise it to be heard.

I pushed the door open.

The first thing I noticed was the lighting.

Our apartment ran on cheap bulbs my father kept meaning to replace; the living room always had a yellowish cast, like looking at everything through old cellophane.

The man sitting in my father's armchair had brought no light with him, but somehow the room looked different with him in it. Sharper. More honest about what it was.

He was younger than I expected. That was the second thing.

I'd been bracing for someone old, someone gray-haired and thick with the particular kind of weight that came from decades of decisions no one questioned. The men my father owed were usually old. They had old debts, old grudges, old methods.

This man was perhaps thirty. Dark suit, no tie, the top button of his shirt undone in a way that looked less like carelessness and more like the only concession he made to comfort.

Dark hair. A face built for stillness, not blank, but controlled, the way a surface is controlled when something is moving underneath it.

Dark eyes, the kind that registered everything and returned nothing.

He wasn't looking at my father.

He was looking at me.

I noticed it in myself before I understood it, the thing that happened in my chest when he looked at the room that way. It had no name. It was the first thing in the room I couldn't name.

"Avery." My father stood from the couch too fast. His hands went to his pockets, came back out, found nothing useful to do with themselves. "You're home early."

"I'm on time." I didn't look away from the man in the armchair. He hadn't moved. "Who is this?"

"This," the man said, and his voice was exactly what I'd heard through the door, low and unhurried, built for rooms where people already knew to pay attention, "is a conversation you should sit down for."

"I'll stand."

Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise. More like recalibration, a minor adjustment to an equation that had just gained a new variable.

"Suit yourself."

My father made a sound that was almost my name and sank back onto the couch.

He'd been crying, I realized. Not recently, the redness around his eyes had gone dry.

He'd been crying before this man arrived, which meant he'd known.

He'd had warning and he hadn't called me, hadn't asked me to stay somewhere else tonight, hadn't done anything except sit here and wait for me to come home and walk into whatever this was.

I set that aside. I'd been filing things about my father away my whole life, building a cabinet of evidence I never wanted to open.

"Patrick Callahan," the man said, in the tone of someone reading from a document, "owes the Moreau family thirty-eight thousand dollars in principal, accrued over a period of twenty-six months, plus applicable interest, which brings the total to..."

"I know what I owe." My father's voice came out rougher than intended. "I've always known."

"Then you know tonight is the end of the grace period."

The room went very quiet. Outside, a car passed. Someone's music, a few apartments down, a song I half-recognized and couldn't name. Everything ordinary and oblivious.

"I can get it," my father said. "I just need more..."

"You said that in March." The man tilted his head slightly, the first real movement he'd made. "And in November. And the March before that."

My father made no sound.

I looked at him, really looked, the way I'd trained myself not to because it never produced information I wanted.

He was smaller than I remembered. That happened sometimes, between visits; I'd carry the version of him from the last time I saw him, and then I'd arrive and find the real one, which was somehow always less.

He looked like a man who had been using up the last of himself for a very long time and had recently reached the bottom.

"What do you want?" I asked.

The man looked at me again. Not a glance—the kind of attention that landed and held, full and unhurried, like he was reading something written small, and the back of my neck went tight.

"Avery..." my father started.

"What do you want," I said again, to the man, because my father was clearly not going to be useful here.

A pause. Something moved in the man's eyes, consideration, maybe, or the final settling of a decision already made.

"There are two ways this ends," he said. "The first involves your father's car, his remaining assets, and a conversation with two of my associates that he won't enjoy." He said it without particular cruelty, the way you stated weather forecasts. Facts, not threats. "The second..."

He stopped. Looked at me with that same careful attention.

"Involves you."

The groceries were still in the hallway. I thought, absurdly, about the yogurt. It would need to go in the refrigerator.

"Explain," I said.

"Avery." My father's voice broke on my name. "You don't have to..."

"Dad." I didn't raise my voice. "Stop talking."

He stopped.

I kept my eyes on the man in the armchair, who was watching this exchange with the focused neutrality of someone taking notes. "Explain," I said again.

"There's a contract," he said. "Between our families. It's old, older than the debt, older than most of what your father's built his life around. It establishes a formal arrangement." He paused. "A marriage arrangement."

The room breathed. I didn't.

"Between who."

"Between you," he said, "and me."

My father made a sound I would spend a long time trying to forget. Somewhere between relief and grief, the sound of a man who had already accepted something terrible and was only now watching someone else encounter it for the first time.

I didn't make any sound.

I was too busy counting things. Counting the distance to the door.

Counting the days since I'd last spoken to someone who mattered.

Counting the number of times I'd told myself that my father's problems were his problems, that I'd built enough distance, enough of a separate life, that when the thing came, and I'd always known something would come, had known it with the calm certainty of someone who has read the ending before reaching it, I would be far enough away not to be caught in it.

I had not been far enough away.

"There's a family arrangement," the man continued, with the same even cadence, like he was briefing me on a business matter, which I supposed he was.

"Your grandfather and my grandfather made an agreement years ago.

Your father has been aware of it. When debts reach this point — when there is no resolution and no path to one — the arrangement is called on.

He was asked not to tell you. I find conversations like this go better when no one has time to prepare. "

"That's not an enforceable obligation," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "You're describing a family custom. That's not the same as a contract."

"Correct," he agreed. "I can't compel you legally.

What I can do is pursue the other option — and your father has made clear, in some detail, that he would prefer you avoid it.

" He let that land the way he let most things land: without decoration.

"The arrangement doesn't work because of courts.

It works because of what happens to people who don't honor it. Your father has."

I looked at my father.

He didn't look back. He was staring at his hands.

Twenty-three years. I had twenty-three years of data on Patrick Callahan, locked in the cabinet I never wanted to open, and every piece of it was pointing at this moment — this precise configuration of his cowardice and my persistent, inconvenient love for him.

He was asked not to tell you. I turned that over once and put it down.

It explained the silence. It didn't excuse it.

But it was a fact, and I collected facts.

"If I agree," I said slowly, "he's clear."

"The debt is settled."

"And what does this actually mean?" I gestured at the space between us, at the whole impossible shape of what he was proposing. "In practice."

"You come to New Orleans. You live in my home. You're introduced, publicly, as my fiancée." He held my gaze without apology. "For a period to be determined."

"And if I want to leave."

"You're not a prisoner."

"That's not an answer."

Something almost like respect crossed his face.

Almost. "If you want to leave, we discuss terms. You're not a prisoner," he said again, slower this time, as if precision mattered to him.

"But there are expectations. Appearances to maintain.

People watching who would draw conclusions from your absence. "

"People who would hurt him." I meant my father.

"People who would ask questions. I find it's better not to give them reasons."

The music from down the hall had stopped. The car that had passed was long gone. The yogurt in the hallway was definitely going to be a problem.

I turned to look at my father one more time.

He finally raised his eyes to mine. And in them I found what I always found, the love that was real and the failure that was realer, layered over each other until you couldn't separate them anymore, until they were just the texture of him, the material he was made from.

"You should have told me," I said.

"I know." His voice was barely a sound. "I'm sorry, baby."

I had heard those words so many times they had worn smooth. They didn't catch on anything anymore.

I turned back to the man in the armchair.

"What's your name."

"Dominic Moreau."

I nodded. Stored. "I have conditions."

He waited. No protest, no surprise, just that stillness, like a man accustomed to negotiations that started exactly this way.

"I finish my degree," I said. "I don't disappear. I don't become decorative." I held his gaze. "And you don't lie to me. Not about anything that matters. I'm not asking for everything. I'm asking that what you do tell me is true."

A pause. Something shifted in him, not visible exactly, but perceptible, the way a change in air pressure is perceptible before a storm.

"Agreed," he said.

He stood then, for the first time, and I understood the armchair, the stillness, the entire economy of his presence: he didn't need height or movement to own a room. He had already owned this one from the moment he sat down. Standing was almost incidental.

He was taller than I'd registered. He straightened his jacket.

"Someone will be in contact tomorrow with details." He looked at my father briefly, not warmly, but without malice either. Indifferent, the way you were indifferent to things you'd already accounted for. "Callahan."

My father nodded without lifting his head.

Dominic Moreau walked to the door, paused with his hand on the frame, and turned back once.

Not to my father.

To me.

"The groceries in the hall," he said. "There's yogurt. It'll turn."

He left before I could answer.

I stood in the middle of my father's living room for a long moment, listening to his footsteps disappear down the stairwell, and thought about the fact that this man, this stranger who had just rearranged the entire architecture of my life in under twenty minutes, had noticed the yogurt.

I went to the hall and brought the groceries inside.

I put everything away.

I did not speak to my father.

Later, after he'd fallen asleep on the couch with the television running, I went to my room and opened the drawer where I kept the things I actually valued: my grandfather's watch, a photograph of my mother I'd found in a box I wasn't supposed to open, and a small black flash drive my grandfather had pressed into my palm the last time I saw him, two weeks before he died.

"Keep this," he'd said. "Don't open it unless you need real protection. The kind that matters."

I turned it over in my hands.

Thought about the word protection.

Thought about Dominic Moreau, sitting in my father's chair like he'd always belonged in it, saying I can't legally compel you, which was, I realized now, the most careful sentence in the whole conversation. Not I won't. Not I wouldn't. Only that he couldn't. Legally.

I put the flash drive in my jacket pocket.

Tomorrow, apparently, I was going to New Orleans.

* * *