Page 52 of Grift

When his blue eyes meet mine, they’re cold but he sighs. “Mrs. Cordera alleges that our father seduced her, and not in a consensual way.”

“So he raped her?”

He flinches when I say it. Some part of me breaks open when I speak, my knuckles going white around the steering wheel as they wrap tight enough to break it.

“There’s no proof,” he says quietly.

“If she says it happened, that’s all the proof you need Callan,” I fire back.

The color’s draining from his face. “She never said anything at the time or in all the intervening years. There were no lawsuits. No letters. Technically, she’s never said anything, only the daughter. I even spoke to Rose and she didn’t recall anything.”

He doesn’t seem to notice how he calls our mother by her first name. Just another level of disconnection.

Of course she didn’t. Wine and blind loyalty will do that to you. And sometimes you have to lie to yourself just to live with what the people around you have done. Look at the conversation we’re having right now.

Fuck.

“Lila showed up at the offices shortly before we bought the Trinity, wanting to discuss it,” Callan sounds angry at the memory.

“What did she want?” If this is about money, at least in part, that could explain some of his reaction.

“No, she wouldn’t take a thing. She wanted a fucking apology,” he almost spits. “Can you imagine James Carney apologizing for anything ever? Even that? All these years later?”

I crack my neck.

“Let me get this straight. She showed up looking to talk to one of us, someone that she would have remembered from being at least a friend and maybe more like family, after school brought her back to the Boston area. Trying to make sense of something that happened when she was a kid. She wanted more information about something bad that happened to her mother, maybe some insights or support, and you tried to pay her off?”

From the look on his face, two things are clear. That about sums it up, and that’s not how he views the situation. His stricken look as my words sink in is minor comfort at best.

“I couldn’t imagine what else she would have wanted, and with the Trinity deal on the horizon I was plugging leaks left and right. You have no idea how much foul shit he’s done over the years, Patrick, and how every single one of them came to bite us in the ass with all the coverage that got. The number of enemies, potential avenues for blackmail, the sheer number of people he’s hurt. And what it’s like trying to keep that under control, so we don’t lose everything that we have.”

I thought I had a pretty good idea of what my father has done, and it turns out, I don’t know the half of it. It’s far, far worse than I ever imagined.

You couldn’t pay me enough to do what Callan does, cleaning up after my father and being his righthand man. It’s not like I’m much better, but he’s day to day in the wreckage that our patriarch leaves in his wake.

“Just stay in the car.”

But I hear his door slam and the squeak of his leather shoes on the sidewalk. Typical fucking Callan.

How am I going to walk up to this woman’s door, knowing that my father probably assaulted her mother and ask what I’m about to ask?

There’s no time to contemplate it. The door to the apartment building swings open. It’s a modest building in tough shape, but in a good neighborhood. A reasonable set of a tradeoffs, if I were choosing an apartment for one of my sisters going to school nearby.

Lila’s all grown up. She has her mother’s stark beauty, with high cheekbones and wide dark eyes. A diamond stud winks in her nose and her chin length hair is blue. She’s wearing a t-shirt that has some fucking nerd joke on it that Jessica would probably love.

She sees me, and her face lights up, but then those dark eyes land on Callan and they’re blazing.

“Fuck no,” she barks, and my boot wedged in the door is the only thing that keeps her from slamming it in my face. At least she’d given enough of a hint it was coming. She’s stronger than she looks, though, I put an arm up so I can throw some weight behind it to brace it open against her anger.

“I need to talk to you,” I try to keep the anger from lacing my voice. Not anger at her, but at the situation that brought me here and Callan for making it worse. “Please, Lila. My father is a shit and it sounds like Callan did a bang-up job of following in his footsteps. But that’s not why I’m here.”

Her eyes go unfocused for a second while she processes my words. Her face takes on severe lines, but she answers, “I’m listening.”

“Can I come in?” I don’t say we. Callan can freeze in the street. I’ll deal with him later. “What I want to discuss is regarding my wife, and it’s sensitive.”

At the word wife, her face softens. “Jessica Kensington is a total badass. I saw the piece in the Globe that you two got hitched. She collaborated with a team for a class I was in to design a virtual tour of one of the pyramids. I really enjoyed working with her.”

I have no idea what project she’s talking about. Another thing to add to the list of amazing accomplishments this woman has, that I know nothing about.

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