The Good Chase (24 page)

He whipped around to Caroline, holding out his hand for the phone. Of course she held it hostage.

His sister arched an eyebrow. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

In the ensuing pause, the chime went off to indicate Shea had left a message.

“Do you not know or something?” Caroline teased.

Byrne had to laugh. “Actually I don't. We've never talked about it. But I guess she is. I like to think she is.”

“Well, that's good news, J.P.,” Mom said from the floor, where she was picking through all her new food.

“Mom.” He cringed. “I'm thirty-five. I'm not talking about this in my parents' kitchen.” He grabbed a giggling Caroline around the waist and snatched the phone from her hand. “I'll put this stuff away in a minute. Just give me a sec.”

As he ducked out of the apartment, he even saw his dad grinning at him from where he sat in the armchair. So glad the slightly awkward moment could bring a bit of happiness to this sad, sad room.

Back out on the sidewalk, next to the pizza place window with the flickering neon sign, he looked at Shea's photo for a long second before tapping the Call button. She picked up quickly, and he sank against the brick wall.

“How's it going down there?” Her voice was soft and sympathetic, and he was really grateful she didn't ask how he was.

“Better, now that I can talk to you. I feel very far away. From everything.”

She sighed. “Any news?”

“They're letting me pay their bills for a couple of months. I just bought out Walmart and need to find a way to store it all in their place. I never want to see my brother again. My sister's kid is cute as hell. I miss you.”

She gasped. And then he could tell she was smiling. He couldn't really explain how he knew; he just did.

“It's been less than twenty-four hours,” she said.

“Doesn't matter. A lot can happen in that time.”

“True. Very true.”

He came away from the wall. “You say that like it means something.”

“Welllll. I did a lot of pondering today, and I—”

“Pondering, you say?”

“Yes, pondering. And I think that I'm going to take that thing with Whitten and Right Hemisphere. I mean, I'm at least going to sit down to a meeting with him, hear his ideas in detail. Throw out some of my own. We've got a meeting set for a few weeks from now.”

That made him incredibly happy for her. “You feel good about it?”

“Yeah, I do. It could extricate me from the Amber. It could give me money to put away for the distillery. There are possibilities.”

“And you'd have more time for kilts and those hideous bagpipes.”

She laughed. “Exactly.”

The following pause was filled with things he sensed she wanted to say. “What is it?” he asked.

“I just realized I feel awful for telling you this good stuff when you're, well, you're down there, feeling not so good.”

“Oh, believe me, when I'm
down there
I feel very good.”

“Byrne!”

He laughed, and it felt like it had been days and weeks since he'd done that. How did she always do that to him? This woman who he'd once sworn was made of ice?

“Tell me more,” he prompted. “About Whitten, what you're thinking.”

“I think I'm excited. I'm a little scared, which tells me I'm probably headed down the right track.”

He took a deep, deep breath, nodding to no one. “That's what I've always thought. I wouldn't have gotten where I am without that kind of thinking. I wouldn't have been able to help my family in this moment if I hadn't thought that exact same thing so long ago, and if I hadn't lived it every day since.”

“Really?”

“Leaving them, leaving South Carolina, scared the hell out of me. But I knew it was right. Just had to take that first step.”

He loved the silence that followed, because it was filled with her breathing.

“Any word on that land?” she asked.

He gazed down the totally deserted main avenue, where a lone streetlight directed no traffic whatsoever. “Not since that odd email. I'm going to go do the pushy, obnoxious thing and stop by their offices on Monday.”

“But you said there might be movement on it, right?”

“Yeah, that's what they said. Or hinted at. I'm taking that as license to do a drop-in, wave my checkbook around if I have to.”

“You have a checkbook?”

“A virtual one. Can I wave my phone? Does that have the same effect?” She laughed, and so he felt compelled to say, “I love your laugh.” And then, before she could reply, “I should go. My parents and sister were way too interested in the fact that your picture popped up when you called. I'm afraid I had to tell them about you.”

“And what did you say?”

“That I hoped you were my girlfriend.”

“Well, I am, if you're my boyfriend. My older boyfriend by two years.”

“I knew there was a reason I was feeling guilty and awkward at your parents' house.”

Another sigh. “Call me when you get back, okay?”

He turned and slowly lifted his eyes to his parents' window, desperately wanting to get them out of that apartment. Out of this town, this state. “I may call you before that. I can't promise anything, though.”

“Whenever you want. I'm here. Or at the Amber. But I run the place so it's not like I can't pick up the phone or anything.”

“Okay. Bye.”

I think I love you
.

“Bye,” she said, breathy and lovely, and in his imagination she said those three words back.

*   *   *

B
ut six days later, Byrne returned to New York without the land.

His decade-long dream lay dead and buried in a South Carolina tobacco field, there was still no sign of the brother who'd ruined everything, and he had
no fucking land
.

Because the land, it turned out, wasn't actually for sale, and there were no plans for it to enter the public market.

He'd gone into the company office, as promised, only to find out that there had never truly been movement. The threat to sell had been some sort of internal politics bullshit. Byrne tried to make a counteroffer, but it was useless.

Byrne got it. The situation was business. But this time it was business to them and personal to him, and it hurt in a way he'd never experienced before. He thought of Shea, how she liked to keep those clear lines between the two worlds, and how she hated when they got smudged.

He settled deep into the airplane seat and sipped vodka the whole flight back from Atlanta. Didn't matter that it was midmorning. Two of those little bottles, splashed with soda. The buzz stuck with him as he deplaned and retrieved his bag. It followed him to the taxi stand and rode along with him in the whining, rattling cab as it crawled from LaGuardia into the Upper East Side. It made the city a little blurry, a little bit easier to take.

He'd called New York home for almost a decade now, but was it?

At least his parents and Caroline were situated for a while. At least they'd allowed him to help temporarily, even though they'd refused—again—to let him move them somewhere else. To let him take care of them.

At least he was coming back to Shea.

It had been days since they'd spoken. After the disappointment about the land, he couldn't bring himself to call her. Couldn't force himself to do anything but be with his family, playing cards or shopping or taking Baby K to the park or helping Caroline organize her shithole of a house while Paul sprawled on the couch doing nothing.

They'd never known about his dream to get back that land—and now they never would—but Shea did. Byrne had no idea what he was going to tell her. His heartbreak was almost too great to voice. But she would ask and he would have to open up to her. Before, there had been such great hope, a reason to keep putting on those clothes every day. Now? Now what?

For the first time since leaving for Boston, he felt hopeless. Dreamless.

His body ached all over like he'd just finished the hardest rugby match of his life, one in which he'd played the entire time at a hundred percent and they still lost by fifty. He could actually sense gray hairs poking their way to the surface.

He entered the lobby of his building in a daze. It took two tries to press the button up to his floor because he was just so drained. As he exited the elevator, the hallway with the plush carpeting seemed as ugly and long as the one leading to his parents' place.

Byrne inserted the key into the lock of his front door, thinking dismissively that it felt a little odd, a little loose. In the foyer, he unceremoniously dropped his suitcase and tossed his keys onto the little table underneath the wall mirror. He must've been really out of it, because the keys completely missed the table and clattered to the tile. Odd, considering he'd been doing the same thing every day for years. Whatever.

He wandered half-blind down the hall and into the main room. Frances must have pulled the drapes to keep out the sun, and the place was remarkably dark for morning. With him gone, there'd been nothing for her to do, so he'd given her the week off with pay. She'd probably been grateful to not have to lug his suits to and from the cleaners, to not have to grocery shop. What a dumb thing for him to think about now, but it was literally all the space he had left in his brain.

He flicked on a couple of light switches. The cans in the kitchen came on, as well as the lamp that sat on the long table just behind the couch. Only the lamp wasn't on the table anymore. It was lying in pieces on the floor, the shade askew, the circuitry keeping the bulb alive.

It threw a sickly, dying light on the war zone that was his living room. His heart punched out of his chest.

His entire apartment was destroyed.

18

T
he cops had been over and through his place for the past few hours. The doorman had been questioned and questioned, but he'd seen nothing, had nearly cried with disappointment over this happening to Byrne. The security footage showed no one suspicious or out of place coming in the front doors.

Which meant it had been some kind of inside job, with the perpetrator coming in through the service entrance or the garbage chute. Something like that.

Byrne stood near the kitchen island, gazing with detached numbness at the slashed couch, the shattered coffee table glass, the shredded books. The kitchen floor was a pile of broken dishes and glasses.

Every article of clothing in his closet had some kind of jagged hole or rip. Byrne's own serrated bread knife lay in one of his torn shoes.

The only shirt that hadn't been touched was the purple Italian one. It was still rolled into a tight ball under a pillow near the headboard, where it had been left after he'd peeled it away from Shea's body in what now felt like an eternity ago. He pulled it out and brought it with him back to the kitchen.

A female cop, the one in charge, came into the apartment, her short legs stepping over the suitcase where he'd left it in the foyer. She approached him with a grim face, and though she addressed him, she scanned the disaster.

“A recently hired maintenance guy with a criminal background that he hid from the building owners took a pretty huge bribe from a stranger who said he wanted to surprise his girlfriend who lived here. Maintenance guy said the man was charming and young, late twenties maybe, dark hair. Gave him close to a thousand dollars for access. Fingerprints are all over this place and we've sent them off to the lab. We should have a name shortly.”

Byrne's stare traveled to the shattered coffee table. Then his eyes gravitated to the bookshelves where the books he and Caroline had loved were now in shreds. Then to the framed Boston College and Wharton diplomas that had been ripped from his office wall and smashed to bits.

“Pretty sure I already know the name,” he told the cop, the words hurting his throat.

She turned to him, removing her hat and managing to look both frustrated, pissed off, and impressed all at the same time. “How come you didn't say anything to me before?”

“Because I didn't see it. I mean, I saw it, but I think I was just in shock over the whole thing. I just now pieced it all together.”

“See what?”

He pointed to the coffee table. Once a large square of mahogany wood covered by a thick slab of frosted glass, it was now in tiny pieces, the rug underneath peppered with shards. The green toy train engine sat right in the middle, as though someone had lifted it up high and slammed the metal thing down into the glass . . . and then had gone through the apartment taking every other piece of the train—the coal car, the cow car, the caboose—and tossed them together in the mess.

Everything else in the apartment had been destroyed where it stood. But the train had been gathered and pulverized all in one place. To make sure they were seen together.

“That,” Byrne told the cop. “When those prints come back, I can already tell you they'll belong to Alex Byrne. My brother.”

*   *   *

M
uch later in the day, Byrne wheeled the same suitcase he'd brought to South Carolina back out of his apartment. The only difference was that he'd added a couple of things: the crumpled purple shirt and the green engine.

The toy was unrecognizable now. The whole side had been bashed in, the wheels unturnable, like Alex had held it in his hand and smashed the thing down repeatedly on the edge of a table. Or stamped on it with big, thick boots.

Byrne would've given just about anything to be out on a rugby field just then. Not in practice, not going nowhere on a treadmill, not lifting weights, but powering across the grass with another guy's mug in his face and all Byrne's muscles focusing on the attack.

Instead he pulled the suitcase to the curb, stuck his hand out, and waited for a cab to swerve over.

The other hand pulled his phone out of his pocket and pushed the button to call Shea.

“Long time, no talk,” she said, chuckling upon answering. The sound of a cash register chimed in the background. “Are you home?”

Home. That concept seemed even more foggy now that everything he owned was in tatters.

“I'm in New York, yeah.”

“I've been thinking about you, wondering how you've been.”

The way those words made him shiver confused him even more.

“What're you doing now?” she asked.

“I'm, ah, heading to a hotel.”

“Why?”

His heart jackhammered and his breath came up short. “Because while I was gone my brother broke into my apartment and destroyed it. It's crawling with cops.”

She gasped. “Oh my God. Byrne, I . . . holy shit. You're not going to a hotel. Come stay with me. Please.”

A cab finally swung next to the curb and Byrne opened the door. “I don't know—”

“I insist. Don't be alone right now. The thought of you staying in a hotel when I'm right here . . .”

He was torn. He desperately wanted to see her, to hold her, to just sink into her—and he didn't even mean sexually—but he was balancing on a very fine edge, and he had no idea which way his mood was going to go.

“You can stay as long as you like,” she said. “I'm at the corner bodega right now, but I'll be home in a few minutes.”

“Yo!” shouted the cabbie as he rotated in his seat to glare at Byrne. “You gettin' in or not?”

Byrne couldn't guarantee that the fury he was feeling wouldn't be taken out on an innocent hotel room à la a nineteen-seventies rock star, so he said to Shea, “Is this what it takes to finally get an invitation to your place?”

It was a bad attempt at levity, grasping for their usual easy rapport, but he was strung out and desperate to feel anything else.

“Is this what it would take,” she replied softly, “to give you a little peace?”

He sighed, climbed into the backseat of the cab, and pulled the suitcase in. The cabbie raised his eyebrows and turned an impatient hand, silently asking,
Address, you dumbfuck?

“Where's the secret location?” Byrne asked her.

She told him and he directed the cabbie to Chelsea. Then Byrne sank deep into the seat, closing his eyes.

Shea's studio apartment was on the top floor of a prewar townhome on a tree-lined street. He tugged the suitcase up the cement steps and let his finger hover over the buzzer, noting that his hand still shook. Inside, he heard a door open above, and he climbed two sets of stairs to get to her.

She wore jeans with hems that curled, worn and soft, under her heels. Her white T-shirt looked like it had been cut into a tank top over ten years ago. Bright blue bra straps peeked out from underneath the cut cotton. Her hair was down, streaming over one shoulder.

She was a sight for sore eyes, if there ever was a true definition of the phrase.

Though she smiled, it was strained and sympathetic, and it made him feel strangely uncomfortable. One thumb hooked into the back pocket of her jeans, and she sat into a hip, waiting. Waiting for him to move, to give her an idea of how to act.

The second he stepped into her warm, sunny apartment, she grabbed him with one hand and shut the door with the other. His arms wrapped her up good and tight.

“Hi,” she murmured into his neck, taking a big inhale.

He already knew that she smelled divine.

As her grip on him tightened, he realized what he was doing. He was leaning on her—figuratively and literally—and he found it profoundly disconcerting. He, who had always been the pillar for others, specifically his family.

Gently, he slid his hands around her rib cage and pushed her away.

She chewed a thumbnail as she studied him. “The only thing I can think to ask is ‘How are you?'” she said, “but I know it's the stupidest question in the world.”

He released the suitcase handle and ambled farther into her apartment. It was long and narrow, with a set of two windows overlooking the street in front and two others in the doorless bedroom in the back. The small kitchen sat right in the middle. She'd done the place in overstuffed furniture draped with blankets and printed pillows. Lots of color, very cozy and eclectic. The antithesis of the stark, modern, masculine Amber.

He loved it.

He stood there, looking over the place she'd kept so private it had taken several not-a-dates, a healthy dose of amazing sex, and several Byrne tragedies in a row for her to invite him into.

She came up next to him, slid a hand over his shoulder. “What happened?”

The whole past week slammed into him. Took him out at the knees. He collapsed forward, catching himself on the back of one of her two gray couches. He took a moment, trying to breathe around the stumbling block that was the bass drum of his heart.

Pressing his hands heavily into the couch back, he said to a bright, striped pillow, “Best I can figure? Alex stole everything my parents had and used it to get up here, knowing that I'd fly down there to be with them and Caroline. He bribed some new employee in my building, and broke in to destroy my apartment.”

He pushed away from the couch and faced her. One hand covered her mouth. “Destroyed?”

“Completely. As in . . .” He couldn't say any more. Just went over to his suitcase, kicked it onto its side, and crouched to rip open the zipper, exposing the mangled train engine lying on top of all the dirty clothes he'd hauled back from South Carolina. He grabbed the green metal in a tight fist and held it up to her. She didn't take it, just stared in horror.

“Jesus. Is that . . . ?”

“Yeah.” His voice died. Still crouching, he dug two fingers into his eyes, grinding away the sting. “Everything I had in that apartment. Everything I own, even down to my shampoo and old DVDs. And the train. Especially the train.”

“But
why
?” She lowered herself to the floor next to him. “Did he steal anything?”

He shrugged. “A watch I never wear, some cufflinks. Little metal things he'll probably try to sell. But it wasn't about that for him.”

“So what was it about? I'm kind of lost here.”

Byrne set down the green engine on the hardwood floor between them. “This. It was about this.”

Understanding clouded her eyes.

“Saying ‘fuck you' just wasn't enough for him,” Byrne said. “I kept trying to help my family, would've given them everything I owned if they'd let me, but I cut him off because he took advantage.”

“So he's bitter. Even though it's his own fault.”

Byrne nudged the toy engine farther away like it had just stung him. “Bitter doesn't even cover it. This is his hate. His jealousy. And it came out of something I was trying to do to help them, help him. I'm so fucking angry. If this is what he wanted from me, this breaking down, this rage, then he fucking won.”

She reached out to touch his knee, but it suddenly felt like too much and he stood, moving out of her reach.

“At least you could help them out when you went down there. That's got to feel somewhat good, right?”

Shea's voice was full of hope, of positivity, and even though he knew she was trying to help him, it made him feel false. Because he hadn't truly been able to help, in the end. Maybe temporarily, but everything would go back to the way it was for them very soon. And he'd be piling the bits and pieces of everything he'd ever owned into a Dumpster.

He scowled and scrubbed a hand through his hair.

“What happened with the land?” she asked.

He laughed, because he couldn't think of anything else to do besides scream.

“Oh no,” she whispered, and he heard her rise from the floor.

“‘Oh no' is right.”

“You didn't get it.”

“No. Wasn't ever for sale in the first place and doesn't look like it will be anytime soon. Fuck it.”

“Byrne, I'm so sorry.”

He said nothing. Not a single word came to mind.

“You can stay here as long as you like,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “Bed's not as big as yours is—was—but you can have your own side and everything.”

He glanced all around her apartment, finally knowing what it felt like to be overwhelmed by someone wanting to help you when you believed you should be helping yourself. It wasn't a good feeling. It made him uneasy. Like he was a burden.

“I can go shopping with you,” she offered, pushing a smile onto her face. “I can introduce you to the freedom of buying clothes off the rack. I could carry bags or lamps or new pillows or whatever you need.”

He just stared at her.

“At least it was just stuff, right?” Her smile kept trying to expand.

His eyes dropped to the toy engine and he frowned. “But it's not just stuff. My mom gave that train to me for my tenth birthday. It can't be replaced.”