Page 83 of A Favor Owed

“Oh. Okay. Can I have my oatmeal?”

“What, honey? Oh yeah, sure. Come into the kitchen.”

My mom was on the phone for the next hour, calling people, getting calls. I ate my oatmeal and got dressed and brushed my teeth all by myself, still thinking I was going to my dentist appointment. It wasn’t until my grandma showed up that I realized something was going on.

My mom and grandma sat on the sofa together, watching television for a lot longer than I was ever allowed to watch. At one point, my mom put her hand over her mouth and started crying. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” She said it over and over.

“Mommy?” I’d never seen my mother cry. I looked at the television. There was only one tower. There were supposed to be two.

“Come with me, Brady,” said my grandma, ushering me over to the corner where we kept my toys. She pulled out a couple of dinosaurs, and we started having a battle.

My mom was on the phone again in the kitchen. “It fell!” she cried. “The South Tower just fell! Where’s Brendan, for God’s sake?”

By lunchtime our house had more people in it. Neighbors stopped by. Everyone was crying and hugging my mom and grandma and patting my head and calling me a brave little man. Someone gave me a bowl of alphabet soup.

“When’s Daddy coming home, Mommy?”

“Soon, baby. Soon. Hewillcome home.”

But by dinnertime, my mom didn’t look like herself anymore. Her face was gray. Her bright red hair was a mess from running her hands through it.

“He should have called by now,” she said as she paced the house. “He should have called by now!”

Every time the phone rang, my grandma answered it. She’d shake her head, and my mom would start crying again while my grandma talked to whoever had called.

Finally the phone rang, and my mom answered it. “Hello?”

A moment later, she dropped the phone and fell to her knees and started screaming. Everyone around us was crying, and I was clinging to my screaming mother, terrified and bewildered and desperately wanting my daddy.

Strong arms wrapped around us. At first I thought my dad had come home.

“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

The voice belonged to my dad’s best friend, Connor Quinn. He was a firefighter like my dad. His leg was still in a cast from when he’d gotten hurt on the job a week earlier, but he knelt on the floor with us anyway.

“It’s going to be okay. I’ve got you. I promise.”

I don’t remember much from the days following 9/11, just my mom crying and people always at the house. I listened to the grown-ups and figured out that my dad had died in the South Tower. I was sad and scared all the time, unless Connor was around. When Con was there, I felt like maybe things might be okay someday. I felt like my dad had sent him to take care of us.

Connor kept his promise. It took a long time, but he made my mom smile again. They got married right before I turned eight. At some point I started calling him Dad, just because it seemed natural. Even though I never forgot and always missed my real dad, Con had become my dad in just about every sense of the word.

There was no question I was going to do whatever I could to help him when he got picked up by the feds for forgery. Fortunately for us, one of the federal agents was Luis Rivera, a former firefighter from the Bronx who’d known Connor since high school and served with him in the same ladder company. And both of them, of course, had served with my dad, Brendan McDaniels.

Enter yours truly.

I begged Luis to meet with me. Out of respect to Brendan and Connor, he not only met with me but also gave me information he didn’t owe me. He wanted Angelo Pini for human trafficking, but Angelo had covered his tracks well. There was a chance the daughter knew something about it, but Lou didn’t have enough on her for a warrant. When it came out that he thought the daughter had enrolled in law school in California under a fake name, I offered to defer my recent acceptance to Columbia Law School and head out to Dos Torres and see what I could find out. If I could confirm it was her and get Lou a little bit of information about her activities, Lou could decide whether to take any action.

As soon as we agreed that I would do it, Lou terminated the investigation against Connor and put the forgery charges on hold.

I tell all of this to Angie as I pick glass out of her hand with tweezers, sterilize the cuts, and bandage her hand.

“The last time I talked to Lou was back in September,” I say, “when I told him you worked at Legal Aid.”

“I’d fallen for you by then,” she says softly, her hand shaking as it rests in mine.

I nod my head. “I’d fallen for you, too. Hard. But I knew I’d lost you before I even met you.”

“You should have told me.”

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