Love Around the Corner Page 16

  “That sounds fine.”

  “It would have been. We could have sold those fucking units for exactly the same price, no matter which road we fronted on to.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Jimmy doesn’t like to be told no. He sicced his lawyers on this woman, determined to get her house.”

  “I don’t understand. What could the lawyers do to a woman who owned her own house?”

  His blood chilled as he remembered all the answers to that question. “You’d be horrified to see what a pack of highly trained, ruthless lawyers can do to someone, especially if there’s plenty of money to back them up. Jimmy didn’t even have to have a suit he could win. He just had to drag it into court and keep it there as long as possible. The expense of fighting back was enough to ruin an ordinary person. Of course, for him, it was nothing. Just the cost of doing business. And then there were the bribes.”

  “What? Who did he bribe?”

  “City commissioners, city planners, whoever it took to regulate Mrs. Lopez right out of her house.” Maybe he’d been willfully naive, but he’d never fully understood until then exactly how dirty the whole thing was, how stacked the deck was against ordinary people.

  “How is that legal?”

  He scoffed. “It’s not. You think that matters? Or that anyone cares? It’s all about the money. I always knew Jimmy was hard-nosed. He’s a self-made man, and incredibly successful. That doesn’t happen by accident. But I’d never seen that ruthlessness up close. He just buried this poor woman under lawsuits. His lawyers hounded her relentlessly. She wound up having a stroke and landed in the hospital. Jimmy was crowing. Now that he’d gotten her out of the house, he knew he could win. That’s all he saw.”

  “I hate him.” Gemma had always been ready to fight for those who couldn’t fight for themselves.

  “I’m not his biggest fan these days, either. Honestly, he was probably always that way. But I was off in another division, getting lulled by architects’ renderings and heated floors and Italian marble tiles. I never saw this side of Jimmy’s business.” He paused and blew out a breath. No sense in baring his soul if he didn’t bare all of it, even the ugly, shameful parts. “Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe I didn’t ask too many questions because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach what I found out. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. The life I was living out there, the money we’d made together... I got used to it. I liked it. Maybe I got lured in by it and quit looking as closely as I should have.”

  When he felt Gemma’s hand slide into his, he looked up at her in surprise. “Just the fact that you questioned it means you’re not the same as him.”

  He looked down at their clasped hands. “I hope you’re right about that.”

  “I am. So what did you do?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, staring off across the dark little patch of park. “I owed Jimmy a lot. He brought me into the business, taught me everything I knew, gave me a chance to succeed when I really needed it. The money I’d earned with him—” He broke off, although he was going to have to tell her everything before the night was through, if he was serious about this. “Let’s just say it made a lot of things possible. I was in his debt.”

  “But...” Gemma said slowly. “He’s a monster.”

  “I wasn’t convinced of that at first. I thought he’d just lost sight of the point. Maybe if I talked to him, as family, I could get him to calm down, and see that there was still money to be made for us, and a little old lady could keep her family home.”

  “What happened?”

  He paused, remembering back to that night. He’d waited until almost all the office staff had gone, so no one would see him calling Jimmy out. He’d wanted to give his uncle space to back down and admit he was wrong without losing face in front of everyone working for him.

  “He said I was too soft. He called me a weak-willed coward. There was a lot more. It got pretty ugly. But he summed it up by saying it took guts to make money, and maybe I didn’t have what it took.”

  Gemma was gripping his hand with hers like a vise. “And?”

  Brendan shook his head. “It was like in church when we were kids, those stories about the saints having a revelation and seeing the truth. Standing there in Jimmy’s office, listening to him rant and rave, knowing he felt entirely justified—no, entitled—to ruin the life of this harmless woman—a woman who didn’t have the power to fight back on any level... I just asked myself what the hell I was doing there? How long would it be until I was the guy behind the desk, acting like crushing a helpless person into the ground was just some unavoidable cost of doing business? I felt sick. Like, physically sick. So I told Jimmy I quit and I walked out.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, I went straight to the bathroom and threw up. But then, yeah, I cleaned out my office that night and I walked away.”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “Oh, I know. I just hope I did it soon enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He swallowed hard, focusing on their joined hands for strength. “I feel like, if I died tomorrow and my life was put on a scale, weighing the good I’ve done against the bad, the bad would still win.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she said quietly.

  “I’m not either. That’s what Flaherty Developments is about. Tipping that balance back.”

  “So you’re just going to spend all your money out of guilt?”

  He looked up and gave her a small smile. “It’s not a charity, Gem. I’m running it like a business, and it’ll turn a profit. Just a modest profit. No more than I need to live on. More than that...” He paused and shook his head. “For me, to reach for more than that is a trap I can’t fall into again. I won’t.”

  “You walked away from it all. That’s something he’d never be able to do. You’re not going to turn into Jimmy.”

  He squeezed her hand. “I know. But it’s also about making up for my time there. How many lives did he ruin while I was looking the other way? How many people did he crush to earn the money I lived on?”

  “You can’t hold yourself responsible for what Jimmy has done. He’s the one who has to answer for that, not you.”

  He looked down at their joined hands again, his thumb taking a slow swipe across her knuckles. “It’s not just about Jimmy,” he said carefully. “It’s about you, too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Me?” Gemma asked.

  When Brendan looked up, his eyes were filled with such forthright honesty that she felt the bottom fall out of her stomach. She hadn’t realized that they were at the precipice of this—a reckoning of what had happened between them—until suddenly she was staring down over the edge.

  “And my mother.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know all about my dad.”

  “That he died on the job? Of course.”

  “When Dad died, Mom didn’t handle it so well. I mean, nobody would, but Mom took it harder than some people might have. It took me a long time to figure this out, but my mother...she’s not like other people. She’s fragile. And she’s always relied on the men in her life. First her father, then when he died, her older brother—”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Yes. And then when she got married, she relied on my dad.”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to do in marriage. Rely on each other.” At least, that’s what her parents had done. Personally, Gemma didn’t have a clue how they worked. The only man she’d ever imagined being able to rely on in that way had ditched her in high school. But she was starting to get the feeling there had been much more happening back then than she realized.

  “Mom’s different, though. You never met her, but she’s helpless in a lot of ways. She’s terrified of being alone, she doesn’t think she has what it takes
to make it in the world on her own. And she doesn’t, really. Being left to manage everything after Dad died, paying the bills, taking care of us...she was overwhelmed. She was just this shell. Some days, she didn’t even get off the couch. She cried all the time. Every damned day. She stopped cooking, stopped cleaning, stopped taking care of us. I was twelve when Dad died. Tim was just eight. So it all fell to me. I fed us sandwiches and pasta and rustled up a pizza now and then. I cleaned, I did our laundry. I figured out how to fill out her checkbook and forge her signature so that I could keep the bills paid.”

  “Brendan, I had no idea.”

  “Because I didn’t tell anybody. It wasn’t her fault. Her husband had died.”

  Gemma wanted to protest that a dead husband didn’t cancel out her two live boys who needed her, but she knew better than anyone that everyone handled grief differently. She supposed she had to cut Claire Flaherty some slack.

  “She was just so—” He broke off again, seemingly unwilling to say it out loud.

  “It’s okay.” She squeezed his hand again. “You can tell me. I won’t judge you for whatever you were feeling.”

  He turned his head just enough to give her a small smile. “I think that’s my line.”

  Back when they first met, when she was still deep in her grief, that’s what he always told her. There are no wrong emotions. It’s okay to feel how you feel.

  “It’s the truth. Just say it.”

  “She was just so needy,” he said at last. “Emotionally. Every fear and anxiety she had she dumped on me. Every night, I held her while she cried and worried about not being able to take care of us, about running out of money, about losing our house, about dying...”

  “Jesus, Brendan. No little kid should have to handle that.”

  “There was nobody else. Tim needed to feel like his mom was there for him, so I kept him away from that as much as I could.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “A couple of years? Three? She met Harry Murphy when I was fifteen, and things changed after that.”

  “Who’s Harry Murphy?”

  “He said he was a firefighter from Philly. Said he’d moved to Long Island to help his sister with her kids after she lost her husband in nine-eleven.”

  “You say that like it wasn’t the truth.”

  Brendan released her hand, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “It wasn’t. I have no idea what his real story was. Was there a sister and two nephews on Long Island? Was there a brother-in-law who died in the Towers? Was he even a fucking firefighter? I have no idea. I have my suspicions, but nothing I can prove.”

  “What suspicions? What happened?”

  “So they met at this charity thing for nine-eleven families. We weren’t one...the fire Dad died in was just some warehouse fire six months before that. But Dad was a firefighter, and Mom was a widow. His old firehouse invited her to all that stuff. She never went. She didn’t go anywhere, really. But I talked her into going to this. I thought it would be good for her to get back out there and talk to people...people who weren’t me. Jesus, that sounds terrible.” He dropped his head into his hands, fingers gripping his hair.

  Gemma placed her hands on his shoulders, leaning over the curve of his back. “Brendan, no. You were a kid who was being asked to handle way too much.”

  Almost like he couldn’t bear her sympathy, he sat back, shaking her hands off. “So she went. And she met Harry there. Within a couple of weeks, they started dating. She changed overnight. She was so happy, so excited. She got her hair cut, she bought new clothes. She started cooking again, like she used to, back when Dad was still alive. It was like we had our mom back again. And best of all, not once did she come to my room and cry herself to sleep in my bed. I was fucking thrilled. In my opinion, Harry Murphy was the best thing that had ever happened to us.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “I didn’t care if I did or not. He was an adult, a man, and he was doing everything for Mom I hadn’t been able to do. He moved in after a few weeks and for a while, everything was good. He took Tim to softball practice and fixed stuff around the house. All I had to worry about was school and soccer, just like before. Then Mom came to me and said they were thinking about getting married and how would I feel about that?”

  “What did you say?”

  Brendan turned to look at her, that old bitterness back in his eyes—the eyes of someone who’d seen too much and grown up too fast. She knew because those were her eyes, too. “What do you think I said? I was so fucking happy to be free of the burden of my mother that I practically shoved her into his arms.”

  “Hey, no—”

  “Don’t worry. Fate taught me a lesson pretty quick. He was a fraud. Harry Murphy wasn’t even his real name. I don’t know what his real name was. He was a con man.”

  “But...what could he have possibly conned out of a widow and two kids?”

  “My dad’s death benefits. Mom got almost ninety thousand dollars, plus half his salary. That was the only reason we’d survived until then, because it’s not like Mom could hold down a job. We’d spent some, but there was still plenty left. Plus, Harry convinced Mom to take out a mortgage on the house. He had all these big plans for renovations. They’d pay for themselves, he told her. Well, as soon as Harry got Mom to put him on her bank account, he cleaned out every dime and disappeared.”

  “That son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah. I have this theory that he’d come to New York sniffing around for a nine-eleven widow. They got huge payouts. Millions. But there was too much public attention on them. It would have been too obvious. Mom had a lot less money, but she was easy pickings. As you can imagine, she didn’t handle his vanishing act very well.”

  “Brendan, you never told me any of this.”

  “Because by the time we met, it was over. He was gone, and she seemed to have gotten over it. She felt terrible about having brought Harry into our lives, and she promised everything would be fine now that he was gone. She was taking care of the house, managing the bills. We still had Dad’s half salary and social security payments for me and Tim, and I figured that was enough to cover everything. I thought it was all under control. I was wrong.”

  He shifted, turning on the bench until he was half facing her. Then he reached out for her hands, his expression serious and purposeful.

  “Gem, this is the explanation you deserved fourteen years ago. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything then. I was still trying to protect her, I guess. And...well, I felt guilty because it was my fault.”

  “What are you talking about? What was?”

  “A few months before I graduated, I found a bunch of statements. Credit card statements, another mortgage on the house...it turned out things hadn’t been okay. She hadn’t been making ends meet on Dad’s half salary. We were nearly a hundred thousand dollars in debt.”

  “What? How is that possible?”

  “She was paying the first mortgage and the car payment with credit cards. We were living on the second, but she wasn’t making payments. Month after month. Everything was already in collections by the time I found out.”

  “Jesus.”

  “When I confronted her, she fell apart, of course. She didn’t know what to do, how to fix it. Neither did I. I was supposed to start college classes in the fall, but fuck, how was I supposed to do that?”

  “I remember,” she murmured. It had all been part of their plan. While she’d been scribbling Brendan’s name in the margins of her notebooks, dreaming about decorating their first apartment, he’d been dealing with his entire life melting down. She felt a stab of anger, this time not because he’d left her, but because he hadn’t trusted her. “You should have told me. I deserved to know.”

  “I know. You deserved the truth. But I guess I kept it from you because I felt like a failure. I was the one who’d slipped up, who let
my guard down and let Harry Murphy into our lives. And after... She couldn’t handle anything before Harry, so why the hell did I think she’d be able to handle things after? I should have asked more questions after he left. I should have stepped up. Instead I buried my head in the sand for two years, hanging out with my friends and playing soccer, pretending I was a normal high school kid. If there was trouble at home, I didn’t want to know about it.”

  “You were in high school. Taking care of your family wasn’t your responsibility.”

  “That’s rich, coming from you.”

  “My situation was different. My mom died. I had to help take care of everybody.”

  “And my dad died,” he snapped, his anger breaking through in a rare flash of raw honesty. “I was supposed to take care of them and I failed.”

  She still thought he was being too hard on himself, but she didn’t press it. She knew better than anyone the sense of obligation.

  Brendan inhaled deeply, reining in his emotions again. “Yes, I should have told you what was going on. I’m sorry. But telling you the truth wasn’t going to keep the inevitable from happening.”

  “Which was?”

  “Mom was a wreck. Because of Dad, I had scholarship money from the city for college, but it wasn’t like I could still go. I couldn’t spend two years taking classes and studying for the firefighters’ exam just to get a firefighter’s starting salary, not when we had all this debt hanging over our heads. And what about Tim? In four years, he was graduating. He’d qualify for a scholarship, too, but just tuition at a state school. Nothing else. Do you know what it really costs to send a kid to college?”