The Cornerstone (2 page)

Gerard was good at that: portraying himself as something pleasant despite being a complete tool.

As fate would have it, Gerard was going through his own divorce now. He and his wife, Meredith, called it quits about six months ago and he was busy proving a point to her. He wanted Meredith to know that he’d moved on and he was better off without her, and he was going hard at sending those messages.

Apparently, I was good ‘get back at your ex-wife’ material, and he wanted to be seen all over town with me. I attributed one hundred percent of my appeal to the fact that the work of Walsh Associates was featured in seven different design and architecture publications in the past four months, and we were currently restoring a home for Eddie Turlan from the eighties punk band The Vials.

Gerard also wanted to fuck his anger away. Quite unfortunately for me, he had some trouble maintaining erections, and routinely blamed Meredith for that while we were in bed. It was charming to watch him berating his cock and cursing his ex.

That was one of the many reasons we didn’t get between the sheets too often.

I didn’t love Gerard, and I didn’t especially like him either. He talked constantly and with no regard for whether anyone was listening. He was rude in subtle, elegant ways that most people interpreted as highbrow snark.

There was always a segment on NPR or a golf tournament worth recounting, but at the very minimum, he kept me occupied. Despite his soliloquies, I always had a dinner date at the ready. He was pleasantly reliable…and barely tolerable, but the only objective for me was moving the fuck on.

“Would you like me to reschedule anything?” Tom asked.

I drummed my fingers on my armrests and shook my head, but I didn’t turn away from the windows. “No. Thank you, though.”

My eyes landed on the emerald agate geode on the corner of my bookshelf. It was just a rock with something remarkable hiding inside, and it appeared in my office six years ago without a card or return address. The only identifying information was a Brazilian postmark.

There were other mysterious geodes, too. Some were no bigger than a strawberry and others were the size of a softball, and they came with postmarks from all over the world. Russia. Austria. South Korea. Canada. Zambia.

Only one person who would drop rocks in the mail and send them my way without explanation. Someone who liked to remind me that I was a self-centered bitch who needed to take myself a hell of a lot less seriously.

Well, now there were two people who knew those things.

Yeah, today was going to be special.

*

Before sunset, I’d
bought one property, sold another, and found two more to lust over. I wanted to snap them up before anyone else noticed the gorgeous—yet completely trashed—Public Garden-side brownstones, but this day wasn’t going well enough to make quick decisions.

A dish of gnocchi sat untouched in front of me, my glass of pinot grigio was growing warm, and I was drowning out Gerard’s commentary about wind farms. It could have just as easily been his position on the area’s best driving ranges or how he was diversifying his portfolio, but I wasn’t even close to listening.

Instead, I was debating whether we’d get a bigger payoff from merging the twin brownstones on Mount Vernon Street into a super-mansion or restoring them as they stood. This was the kind of project Matt lived for, and if I could get him on board, it would be huge for him. A twelve-thousand-square-foot structural remodel and preservation job meant an eight-figure price tag, and a sale like that translated to major publicity. It was exactly what Matt needed to finally grab some awards of his own and garner the media attention that Sam and Patrick picked up without effort.

“Dessert?” Gerard asked, gesturing to the menu the waitress was offering.

It took me a moment to realize he expected a response. Most of the time, he required no more than the occasional nod.

“No,” I said. I wanted my bed, pajamas, and
Game of Thrones
. Some Jon Snow would help my mood. “I have an early meeting.”

It wasn’t exactly false; all of my meetings were early relative to Gerard’s firm, where the partners strolled in around nine thirty. I texted Tom to get me on Matt’s calendar for a Mount Vernon Street visit tomorrow, and engrossed myself in looking busy with emails.

Gerard talked the entire walk back to my apartment—something about paleontologists discovering an ancient species of birds. Whipping the babble out of him wouldn’t have required much work on my part, but I didn’t have the desire to fix him. Everything about this was temporary, and when the emotionless boredom of my time with Gerard left my wounds scabbed over and my heart numb, this would end.

It was misery, but it was the best I could do right now.

The prehistoric bird story continued until I pointed to a chair in my living room and said, “Make yourself at home. I’m getting some wine.”

I grabbed a bottle from my pantry without concern for variety or origin and stood at the sink, gazing at the night sky. A nearly full harvest moon was shining bright over the Charles River, and it seemed too close, too heavy to be real.

Gerard called to me from the hall but I ignored him. There was probably a tennis match he thought I needed to see.

Sometimes I studied the sky and wondered about the order of it all. Who would I be if I hadn’t lost my mother and been forced to grow up at nine years old? What if I hadn’t been forced to grow all the way up at seventeen when my father kicked me out of the house? Would I be standing by while my brothers filled their lives with love and happiness and meaning? Would I still be negotiating the lesser evils of loneliness and limp dicks?

“
Shannon
,” he repeated, his tone more abrupt than I’d ever heard before. “Could you join me out here?”

Abandoning the wine in the kitchen, I rounded the corner and found Gerard in the front hallway with the door open. From my vantage point, I couldn’t see past the door.

“There’s someone here to see you, Shannon,” Gerard said, and my stomach dropped into my shoes.

Nothing good ever came from an unexpected visitor at ten thirty on a Monday night, and I realized
this
was what the universe had been warning me about all day. Not a dead phone, not a showdown over yogurt. This.

I closed my fingers around the edge of the door and pulled it open, and then air was gone.

Even in a dark hoodie and jeans, even with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, even with a clean-shaven jaw, even after all these months. I knew him. I’d always know him.

“Shannon,” he said, his voice deep and commanding and filled with too many memories to manage in this moment.

Before I could stop myself, a broken, breathy sob escaped my lips. It was equal doses of hell-sent anger and the kind of affection that drained oceans, moved mountains, and slowed time.

I wanted to hold him close, so close that he melted into me and we couldn’t tell one from another, and then I wanted to slap the shit out of him.

“Will,” I said.

THEN

“Do I dare disturb the universe?”

—T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

WILL

Eighteen months ago

I
missed the
ocean so much it hurt.

When the plane descended below the clouds and I caught my first glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean in almost three years, I damn near cried. The only body of water I’d seen in months was the Kabul River, and that wasn’t intended for surfing.

I took my time wandering through the Boston airport. I still didn’t understand how my little sister Lauren—she’d always be Lolo to us—was getting
married
.

This
weekend
.

To a
man
.

We last spoke in August, around her birthday, and she wasn’t seeing anyone then. Fast forward a few months and some highly covert ops, and I’m being shoved on a transport plane to appear at my sister’s wedding.

How the fuck did all that happen?

Unsurprisingly, my mother was stationed on the other side of the security checkpoint. Her fingers were flying over her smartphone, and I realized I hadn’t read her blog in months.
Shit.
As far as my mother’s affection for her children ranked, it was Lo, the blog, me, then Wes.

Allegedly, my younger brother Wes was a real asshole while he was a toddler. Thirty years since the terrible twos ended, and my mother was still reminding him about that.

Mom startled when I dropped my backpack beside her, but that shock transformed into a wry frown. “Oh for the love of Pete, William, would it kill you to groom yourself once and a while?”

Apparently thirty-four wasn’t too old for my mother to scold me for messy hair and an overgrown beard.

My mother’s fingers fluffed my hair before they fisted, and she yanked me down for a hug. “I’ve been a little busy with the global war on terror and all,” I said. That, and a certain amount of shaggy scruff was essential in my line of work. “And one of these days, you’re going to have to tell us who this Pete guy is, Judy.”

She pulled my hair a little harder; she hated it when I called her Judy. If she had her way, we’d still be calling her mama and asking her to rock us to sleep.

“He’s my man candy on the side,” my mother replied with a shrug. I bet my father loved hearing that one. “Keeps me young.”

She shifted her hands to my shoulders, squeezing down to my biceps, elbows, forearms, and then gripped my hands. She always did this when I returned home from deployment. It was her way of checking that I was still in one piece. After years as a Navy medic, my mother knew exactly what the battlefield could take.

“I really wish you didn’t tell me that shit, Mom.”

She ran her hands up and down my chest, and repeated the motion on my back. “Too long, Will. Too long,” she whispered. A smile pulled at her lips, but the tears shining in her eyes gave it all away. “I don’t want them keeping you for another twenty-seven months straight. I’ll tell that to the Joint Special Operations Commander himself if I have to.”

“You do that, Mom,” I laughed, pulling her toward the baggage claim. But she was right; it had been deployments, extended deployments, special deployments, all one after another. Pepper that with training ops and a couple of months with an advanced demolitions crew, and I could only count a few weeks of leave in the past three years. “I bet the Lieutenant General loves hearing from SEAL moms.”

She rolled her eyes before wrapping her arm around my waist. “How were your flights?” she asked.

“Strange,” I said when reaching for my bag. She pointed to the sliding doors and I followed her to the curb. “It’s been a while since I stayed in an aircraft through take off
and
landing.”

“You and your HALO humor,” she murmured. “Wesley’s parked over there. He’s telling stories.”

My mother gestured to the far end of the loading zone where Wes had two members of the State Police hanging on his every word. He mimed an explosion, and despite the fact we were at an airport and bombs were the last thing anyone should ever discuss, his new Statey pals were captivated. The story was effective in distracting them from his illegal curbside parking, too.

“And that’s how you get out of Moscow before the Spetsnaz notices you were there in the first place,” he said. With a lopsided smile, he beckoned me closer and draped his arm around my shoulder. “Boys, it’s my pleasure to introduce my brother, Commander Halsted.”

“It’s one promotion after another with you, isn’t it?” Mom asked. “Maybe now you’ll get off the front lines.”

Unlikely.

Once the pleasantries were handled, my mother grabbed us by the collars and towed us toward the rental car. “You two need haircuts, and anything would be better than cargo pants and old t-shirts.”

I sucked in the fresh, salty air as we approached Cape Cod, and I wanted to spend every minute of the next four days in the ocean. I was raised on the beaches of San Diego, a water dog to the soul, and I believed an afternoon spent surfing was the cure for anything that ailed me.

Wes leaned on the center console and glanced to me in the backseat. “Where have you been hiding out these days?”

“J-bad.” I shrugged; all told, I didn’t spend much time on base in Jalalabad. “Or thereabouts. And what the hell were you doing in Moscow?”

“Started as a sneak and peek with a recon squad,” he said. “Ended with a surprise extraction. Good times.”

Wes was a master of tradecraft. Despite his thoroughly California looks, he could blend in anywhere and spoke enough languages to make it believable. He’d been loaned out—along with a few other SEALs and Delta Force guys—to man a covert unit responsible for preventing another Cold War. It was a classic counterintelligence program potluck, and it was a mystery who’d be cleaning it all up.

“Get it all out now,” Mom said, “because you won’t be talking about reconnaissance and assault teams at your sister’s wedding.”

“Yeah, can we talk about that? What does the Commodore say about this?” I asked. There was no doubt that my father was not excited about seeing Lo married. “When did Lo get engaged? And who the hell is she marrying?”