Chapter 45 - Plans For Angie

Chapter 45: Chapter 45 - Plans For Angie

"Oh my God." She looked up. "Oh my God, Carrie. That’s Saint Laurent. That’s a real Saint Laurent."

"I know."

"How many of these are there?"

"Eighteen outfits," Carrie said faintly. "Plus shoes. And bags. And some jewelry."

Aileen sat back on her heels and stared up at her.

"Eighteen."

"Can you help me get them inside before Mrs. Kowalski comes out and asks if I robbed a store?"

That snapped Aileen out of it. She scrambled to her feet, grabbed an armful of garment bags and hauled them into the apartment. Carrie followed with the shoeboxes. They went back and forth four times, until the living room was buried and the couch had completely disappeared under a mountain of tissue paper and ribbon.

Carrie set the takeaway bag on the coffee table and collapsed onto the one clear corner of the couch.

Aileen stood in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, slowly turning in a circle.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I need you to explain this to me like I’m five."

"I don’t know if I can."

"Start with how." Aileen dropped down beside her, shoving a box of heels out of the way. "How did you get him to buy all this? What did you do?"

"That’s the thing. I didn’t do anything." Carrie pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "I showed up at six like he told me to. He made me get in his car. He took me to this boutique on Madison and told the guy to bring out the most beautiful clothes they had, and I tried to tell him I didn’t want any of it, and he just..." She stopped, her cheeks going pink at a memory she decided not to share. "He told me to go back to the sales guy. So I did. And then he took me to dinner at this place in Tribeca with no sign on the door, and we ate in a private room with angels painted on the ceiling."

Aileen blinked at her.

"Angels."

"On the ceiling."

"Car, does he like you?"

Carrie opened her mouth, then closed it again.

"I honestly can’t tell," she said finally. "One minute he’s threatening to have me arrested, and the next he’s spending seven hundred thousand dollars on me. He orders me around like I work for him, and then he carries my bags up four flights of stairs." She shook her head. "I keep trying to figure out what he’s thinking, and every time I think I’ve got it, he does something that throws me off completely. I don’t have a read on him at all. He’s so unpredictable."

Aileen studied her sister’s face.

Carrie was staring off at nothing, a faint, faraway smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, her fingers absently smoothing the gold silk over her knee.

A slow grin spread across Aileen’s face.

"And you love that," she said. "Don’t you?"

Carrie’s head snapped around. "What?"

"You love it. Look at you. You’re blushing."

"Shut up." Carrie grabbed a wad of tissue paper and threw it at her. Aileen batted it away, laughing. "I’m not blushing. He’s just... mysterious, okay? That’s all."

"Mysterious," Aileen repeated, grinning even wider.

"Yes, mysterious." Carrie lowered her voice. "And he promised he’d deal with Angus."

The grin slid right off Aileen’s face.

The room went quiet. Down on the street, someone leaned on a car horn.

"He said that?"

"At dinner. I told him everything. The package. The debt. What Angus said he’d do to you." Carrie looked down at her hands. "And he just said, ’Don’t worry about Angus. I’ll take care of him.’ Like it was nothing. Like he was offering to pick up the check."

Aileen pulled her legs up onto the couch and hugged them, a mirror image of her sister.

"How?" she asked quietly. "How could he possibly do that? Angus has people, Car. Angus has guns. And this guy’s what, some rich dude in a suit?"

Carrie thought about it. She thought about everything she had experienced with Jesse in just one day and smiled to herself.

"I really don’t know," she said.

She reached over, pulled the takeaway bag toward her and pushed it into her sister’s hands.

"But I wouldn’t bet against him."

******

Jesse was home three minutes after dropping off Angie.

He parked the Porsche at the curb in front of his mother’s building, killed the engine and sat in the dark for a moment, looking up at it.

The three stories of brick had gone tired and grey over the years. The front stoop was cracked down the middle, and the security door only locked if you jiggled it. Paint was peeling off every window frame, and one of the second-floor windows had been patched with cardboard and duct tape since spring. The trash cans by the side gate were overflowing again. Nobody ever took them out on time except him.

He’d lived here his whole adult life, but tonight was the first time he’d really studied the place.

He grabbed the takeaway bag from the back seat, took out the clothes he bought from the backseat and went inside. He climbed the creaky stairs to his unit, unlocked the door and stepped into the quiet apartment. It still smelled faintly of Tatiana’s perfume, even though her things were gone. The couch sagged in the middle, the kitchen faucet dripped, and the radiator ticked in the corner. His mother’s knitted blanket was still folded over the arm of the couch, right where Tatiana had left it.

He put the takeaway in the fridge, next to a carton of milk that had almost certainly expired.

Then he stood in the middle of the living room and looked around.

He had more than eighty million dollars, and he was standing in a cramped apartment with a dripping faucet above a cardboard-patched window.

His apartment wasn’t the only thing that needed fixing. The whole building did. It needed new windows, new wiring, new pipes and probably a new roof. It needed a real security system and a lobby that didn’t smell like old cigarettes. He could gut the entire place and rebuild it from the ground up, and make it the kind of building his mother had always deserved to own.

Then there were the tenants.

Some of them were good people. Nolan paid on time every month, even if he usually paid while wearing nothing but boxers and a headset. Mrs. Owen on the first floor had brought his mother soup every week when she was sick, and she still waved at Jesse every morning.

Others had been taking advantage for years.

The Delgado brothers on the second floor hadn’t paid a full month’s rent in over three years. The guy in 3B had cried to his mother about losing his job, then bought a jet ski the following summer. The couple in 2A had sublet their unit on Airbnb for eighteen months and pocketed the difference, all while telling Emma they couldn’t afford the rent increase.

Every one of them had known his mother was too kind to throw anyone out and too soft-hearted to take anyone to court. By the end, she’d been too sick to fight at all.

Jesse’s jaw tightened.

Some of those people needed to go.

But that would have to wait until the building was actually his to keep. First he had to deal with Leonard and Mason Goldfinch, their army of lawyers and their eviction notice. He had five days left, and Ben Pruitt was expecting him at nine.

One war at a time.

He showered, brushed his teeth and fell onto the bed in his boxers.

He’d stripped the bed and put on fresh sheets before work that morning. He couldn’t stand the thought of sleeping on anything Andrew Hyland had touched.

He lay on his back and stared at the water stain on the ceiling.

Tomorrow he had Ben Pruitt at nine, then McQuise by noon, then two surgeries back to back. The One-Time Full Recovery was waiting in reserve.

He needed to sleep, but his mind kept replaying the last half hour.

He could still feel Angie’s fingers twisting into his collar and the desperate way she’d kissed him. He could hear the soft sound she’d made when his hand slid along her jaw. And he kept coming back to the way she’d hesitated at her own front door with the key already in the lock.

She’d told him to forget it.

Jesse smiled slowly up at the ceiling.

With his new memory, he’d remember every second of tonight for the rest of his life. He had a feeling she would too.

For thirteen years, Percy Bonham had shown up outside this building, called his job and insulted his mother in front of the neighbors. He’d followed Jesse through grocery stores. Every single time, he’d asked the same question: where’s your father, Jesse? Like Jesse was nothing more than a breadcrumb trail to the man he actually wanted.

And all that time, his beautiful wife had been sitting alone at home with their daughter, watching the window for a car that never came.

Jesse closed his eyes.

’I’m going to make her mine,’ he thought.

He smiled in the dark.

’Percy Bonham be damned.’