Page 23 of Gather the Storm

I’d hedged when I’d first come down to breakfast, talking about my upcoming internship — the one he’d insisted I take, the one I took knowing I needed something to appease him with and also a little extra money to feed the three giants I’d be living with — and the weather and basically anything other than the fact that I was moving into the house at the top of the Falls.

“It’s perfectly safe,” I said. “Besides, I’ve already hired a security company to install an alarm.”

It was kind of a lie. I planned on asking the guys to look into it — especially Otis; he was good with that kind of thing — but jumping right into the whole I’m-going-to-live-with-Blake’s-killers thing would probably give my dad an aneurysm.

I would tell him that part once I was moved out, when it would be harder for him to get me to stay, hopefully before he heard it through the Blackwell grapevine.

Joan, one of the housekeepers, bustled in to replace the silver carafe of coffee with a fresh one. She set down a plate of blueberry muffins and I wondered if they’d been made with the new recipe we’d tried together over the weekend.

My dad didn’t like that I hung out with Joan and the rest of the people who worked in the house and on the grounds. He said it was inappropriate, that it blurred the lines between staff and employer, but most of them had been around since I was little — since before my mom died and Blake was murdered.

They were like family to Ruth and me.

I cut a glance at Calvin Conlan, my dad’s right hand man and lap dog, sitting in a chair halfway between my dad and me. He reached for one of the muffins and went back to looking at his phone, but I had a feeling he was registering every word of my argument with my dad.

Technically, he was my dad’s head of security, but with his shaved head and watchful eyes, I always had the feeling he was sucking up information, storing it to use later.

Like my dad, he wore a suit. Unlike my dad, he was trained in all kinds of martial arts and carried a gun everywhere he went.

“I forbid it,” my dad finally said, dabbing at his mouth with the linen napkin that had been spread across his lap while he ate breakfast and read the paper.

The newspaper felt like a relic of the past — and not the good kind. I loved old things, loved antiques and old houses and musty books with fraying cloth covers. There was something personal — somethingimmediate— about those things when they weren’t curated and polished to perfection.

But here, in the massive house my father had built to appear old, it all felt like artifice. There were a few antiques in the house, pieces my mom had managed to sneak in when my dad wasn’t paying attention, but most of the furniture were reproductions.

Like the house, they’d been designed to give the appearance of age, of history.

It was all fake, and I was tired of living in a shadowbox of the past, like a dollhouse bought at Ikea and filled with tiny furniture made to look old. I was ready for some authenticity — some honesty — even if it meant living in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere with my brother’s killers.

“I’m twenty years old,” I said.

My heart beat so fast I was afraid it would jump out of my body. My dad wasn’t the type to really lose his shit, but he wielded disappointment like a scalpel, and I feared that a lot more.

“Exactly my point,” he said. “You have no idea how the world works.”

Like your mother.

The words were unspoken but I heard them lingering in the air like vapor.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’d rather learn by being in it than by taking someone else’s word for it.”

He tossed his napkin on the table. “That goddamn house.”

He’d hated the old house, had wanted my mom to sell it. It was one of many things I’d heard them arguing about before she died.

I stared at him, determined not to back down. “It’s from Mom. She wanted me to have it and I want to handle the renovations myself.”

He scoffed. “You don’t know anything about renovations.”

That hurt a little even though he was right. It was true that I’d never handled a big reno, but I’d been into decorating since I’d been a kid. When we got older and Cassie and Sarai binged episodes ofGossip Girl, I watched HGTV. When they went shopping for new handbags, my mind was on the yard sale we’d passed on the way into the city.

I know. What a nerd right?

It wasn’t that I was above a new handbag. I liked shopping as much as the next girl, but decorating was my passion and I’d never been able to do more than repaint my bedroom and pick out new furniture every few years.

The house was the perfect opportunity to try my hand at a big project, and I was excited in spite of the strangeness of the situation.

“No one knows anything about a big renovation until they work on one,” I said. There was a college with courses like Demo 101 and Sheetrock Fundamentals.

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