Chapter 20 Someone’s Safe Harbor, Just Not His
Someone’s Safe Harbor, Just Not His
They only left their hotel rooms at night.
They’d take a walk on the beach after most of the resort was asleep. Late-night walks, when the resort was quiet, their feet in the cool sand.
The rest of the time, they dug in. They recorded. And they tabulated. And they discussed. They ordered room service and kept the DO NOT DISTURB sign on their doors and declined housekeeping.
They compiled all of it. They organized every written piece of correspondence between Nicholas and the organization.
Nicholas started at the beginning and walked Owen through the history in chronological order—what was written down, and the many things that weren’t.
He walked him through everything from that very first meeting with Frank on Fisher Island, nearly four decades ago, leading up to the present day.
Every case, every conversation, every piece of testimony.
There was a lot that wasn’t relevant or that they couldn’t use. But going through it led them to what they could.
And Nicholas walked Owen through the rest of it in great detail. He walked him through what Owen most needed to know.
The most important part of all of this: Frank’s children.
There were six of them in total.
Quinn was the oldest, and Frank’s favorite.
She was followed by Teddy, Frank’s oldest son and Quinn’s Irish twin, who was not even fourteen months younger than his sister.
And, at least the way Teddy saw it, always trying (and failing) to catch up—especially when it came to their father’s affection.
Frank’s second son, Dominic, was eighteen months sober—the longest that Dominic had ever been sober.
He was working in the music industry in Franklin, Tennessee, just outside Nashville.
He had three kids—two from his last marriage, a stepson from his current (and fairly new) marriage.
He was married to a wonderful woman he met at rehab, even though that is advised against. Each of them doing their best so far to hold the other accountable.
Then came the twins, Sarah and Elena. They lived in Silver Lake, down the street from each other, where they hosted an extremely popular fashion podcast, more than two million Instagram followers between them.
Not to mention eight kids between them—who they raised more like siblings than cousins.
Sarah and her husband had three boys and a girl, Elena and her partner, Elizabeth, had three girls and a boy.
Lastly, there was the family baby, Bradley, who was freshly out of law school and an assistant district attorney in Miami.
He lived five miles from his oldest two siblings but mostly kept his distance from them—tried in the ways that counted to keep his distance from all of them—because, in his mind, he had chosen the opposite life.
He hadn’t yet learned, as Nicholas had, that often opposites were more closely related than anything that worked to meet in the middle.
Nicholas outlined extensive details about all the children—because Owen needed to know all of it. In terms of next steps, all of the children were important.
But for the most part, Owen and Nicholas focused on the oldest two children. Quinn and Teddy—the two that Frank was grooming to take over one day. The day, Owen thought, this would all start to be urgent.
Quinn was the apple of Frank’s eye. In part because she looked exactly like her mother, even if on the inside she was the opposite.
Quinn Jennifer Campano Pointe, who was as brilliant as Teddy, was lacking in that department.
She went to Stanford, where she played D1 volleyball and became interested in the law and public health.
She had never been interested in the family business—until the day it became all that she was interested in.
This was in part because of what went down with her husband. And, in part, because of what went down with Owen.
Which, unfortunately, were two sides of the same thing.
Quinn’s husband, Wesley, had been a trusted lieutenant in the organization—and the highest-ranking individual whom Owen’s testimony had put away under RICO. At this point, nearly two decades later, Wesley had spent more of his life in jail than he’d spent outside of it.
This was the main reason Owen was so certain that they needed an insurance policy for Bailey. For Bailey and for Hannah.
Quinn was still grieving the absence of her husband. And, as Owen knew too well—Owen and Nicholas, both—grief played out in the organization as vengeance. Vengeance was where Teddy excelled.
Teddy, aka Francis Theodore Campano Pointe: tall, too-handsome, slippery. Even as a child, he idolized his father. He wanted to grow up to be just like him. Which was the quickest way to ensure that he never managed to get there.
Teddy very much wanted to be his father’s favored successor.
But he didn’t have the brains for it, nor the instincts.
So now he spent much of his time trying to prove to his father (and Quinn) that he had both.
And when he failed, he leaned on being cruel.
Which, more often than not, got the job done anyway.
And put him back in the place he most wanted to be anyway—back in his father’s good graces.
“I feel like it needs to be said…” Nicholas started. “Even if you do manage to pull this off, I still don’t know that she’ll be able to forgive you.”
They were on their midnight beach walk, most of the hotel rooms dark, the oceanfront quiet and moonlit. Owen didn’t need to ask who Nicholas meant. He knew that Nicholas meant Hannah.
“I’m prepared for that,” Owen said.
“There is no preparing for that.”
Owen didn’t argue the point. How could he? He knew that Nicholas could feel it—how Owen’s heartbreak lived inside his skin. That eight thousand miles hadn’t cured him of it. What he had caused. What had been lost.
And still. At the end of the day, as far as Owen was concerned, the only point was this: He loved Hannah and Bailey. With everything he was. And he would do whatever he needed to do to make sure neither of them was punished for that.
“The only thing I care about is that this works,” he said.
“It will work,” Nicholas said.
“We can’t know that yet.”
Nicholas didn’t respond, at first. They had an unspoken rule on these walks to give themselves a break from discussing the work—Nicholas instead filling Owen in on Hannah and Bailey, Owen clinging to every detail, to hold in his hands for later.
Bailey starting to write musicals in college, Hannah moving to Los Angeles to be close to her.
But tonight was their last night together. So it was all bleeding together. The plan. Hannah, Bailey. All of it one and the same. They didn’t touch on Kate though. They never touched on Kate. The pain of her loss, the unfairness, still too sharp between them.
“A few things do need to fall in line, of course…” Nicholas said. “Most important is you surviving what you’re setting yourself up to do here…”
“And you knowing Frank the way you think you do,” Owen added.
“Not exactly,” Nicholas said. “More like the other way around.”