Chapter 1 - “What did you do to her?”
Megan stopped moving the mop.
For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was the faint hum of the refrigerator and the rain tapping against the windows.
She looked at me as though she wasn’t sure what I meant.
Then her expression softened.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the truth.”
I leaned against the counter.
“My mother barely came downstairs before you started working here. Today she made biscuits. Bad ones, but still.”
“Very bad ones.”
“She laughed.”
Megan lowered her eyes.
I watched her more carefully.
She wasn’t beautiful in the deliberate way women around my world often tried to be. She wore no jewelry except a cheap watch with a scratched face. Her brown hair was pulled into a careless knot, and there was a faint streak of flour near one ear that she had apparently missed.
She looked tired.
Not frightened.
That bothered me almost as much as it impressed me.
“People don’t change that much because someone cleans their kitchen,” I said.
“No.”
“So?”
She rested both hands on the mop handle.
“I listened.”
I almost laughed.
“That’s it?”
“That’s harder than it sounds.”
I didn’t answer.
Megan looked toward the ceiling, toward the rooms upstairs where my mother was sleeping.
“The first few weeks I worked here, your mother barely spoke to me. I cleaned around her. She sat near the window. Sometimes I’d ask whether she wanted tea, and she’d say no.”
“That sounds like her.”
“One morning I was dusting the bookshelves in the sitting room, and I found a photograph.”
“What photograph?”
“You were maybe nine. Your mother was younger. There was a lake behind you.”
I remembered it immediately.
Lake Winnipesaukee.
My father had rented a cottage for a week one summer before everything in our family became complicated.
“I asked her where it was,” Megan continued. “She talked for forty minutes.”
A strange ache moved through me.
“About the lake?”
“About you.”
That caught me off guard.
Megan smiled faintly.
“You fell off a dock because you were trying to rescue a toy boat.”
“I was eight.”
“Nine, according to her.”
“She’s wrong.”
“She was extremely confident.”
I folded my arms.
“What else?”
“She told me you refused to come out of the water until you found the boat. She said your father was shouting from the shore and you pretended not to hear him.”
“That part sounds accurate.”
“She said you were the most stubborn child she had ever met.”
“I still am.”
“I noticed.”
Her mouth twitched.
For reasons I didn’t understand, I almost smiled.
Almost.
“Then what?”
“Then nothing. The next day I asked about another photograph. A week later she started coming downstairs while I cleaned.”
“You made her talk about the past.”
“No.”
Megan’s expression changed.
“I let her decide what parts of the past she wanted to remember.”
There was a distinction in those words that I felt more than understood.
She set the mop aside.
“Mr. Mercer, everybody in this house asks your mother what she needs. Her doctors ask about pain. Her nurses ask about medication. The cook asks what she can eat. You ask whether she needs anything.”
“And?”
“Nobody asks what she wants.”
I stared at her.
“She wants to get better.”
“That’s what you want.”
My jaw tightened.
Megan didn’t retreat.
“What does she want?” I asked.
“She wants to choose her own sweater in the morning instead of having one laid out for her. She wants coffee even though she’s only supposed to have half a cup. She wants the curtains open. She wants to complain about daytime television. She wants to make things in the kitchen even when they turn out badly.”
“Anything else?”
Megan hesitated.
That hesitation was small.
But I had built an empire by noticing small things.
“What?”
“She wants you to stop looking at her like you’re saying goodbye every time you leave a room.”
I said nothing.
The rain seemed louder.
Megan immediately looked uncomfortable.
“I probably shouldn’t have said that.”
“No.”
I pushed myself away from the counter.
“You probably shouldn’t have.”
I walked out before she could see how much the words had landed.
I didn’t sleep.
At three in the morning, I was still sitting in my father’s old study with a glass of bourbon I hadn’t touched.
The house had belonged to the Mercers for nearly seventy years.
My grandfather bought it when Mercer Shipping was still legitimate.
Mostly legitimate.
The study preserved that version of us.
Mahogany shelves.
Leather chairs.
Old maps of Boston Harbor.
A photograph of my father shaking hands with a governor who later claimed he had never met him.
I stared at nothing.
Megan’s words repeated in my head.
You look at her like you’re saying goodbye.
Maybe I did.
Because saying goodbye in advance seemed safer.
I had learned early that if you expected loss, it couldn’t surprise you.
My father taught me that without ever meaning to.
When I was eleven, he promised to attend my school recital.
He didn’t.
At thirteen, he promised to take me to New York.
He didn’t.
At sixteen, he promised my mother he would stop bringing business into the house.
Three months later, someone put a brick through our dining room window with a note attached to it.
After that, I stopped believing promises.
My mother never did.
She spent thirty-four years believing there was something good in my father that the rest of us simply failed to understand.
Maybe that was why her illness terrified me.
Catherine Mercer had always been the person who insisted that people were more than their worst choices.
If she disappeared, I wasn’t sure who I was without someone believing that about me.
A quiet knock came at the door.
I reached automatically toward the desk drawer.
Then Mom opened the door.
She wore slippers and a gray robe.
“Do you always reach for a gun when your mother visits?”
I removed my hand from the drawer.
“Only after midnight.”
She stepped inside.
“You should really work on that.”
“You should be asleep.”
“So should you.”
She lowered herself carefully into the chair across from me.
I stood.
“Do you need—”
“Sit down.”
I stopped.
She pointed.
“Sit.”
I obeyed.
Apparently twelve years of intimidating criminals had not prepared me to resist a seventy-year-old woman in orthopedic slippers.
Her gaze dropped to the untouched bourbon.
“You don’t drink when you’re worried.”
“I drink constantly.”
“You hold bourbon when you’re worried. There’s a difference.”
I sighed.
“What are you doing awake?”
“I heard you walking around.”
“From upstairs?”
“This house is old, Isaac. You have the footsteps of an angry rhinoceros.”
I looked at her.
She smiled.
And there it was again.
That thing I had almost forgotten.
Her.
Not the illness.
Not the patient.
My mother.
“I’m glad you’re downstairs more,” I said.
She studied me.
“That was difficult for you.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
I looked away.
She waited.
Mom had always understood silence as a tool better than most men in my business.
Finally I said, “Megan told me you wanted to do more.”
“Megan talks too much.”
“I think that might be her only hobby.”
Mom laughed quietly.
Then her expression became serious.
“I should have told you.”
“Told me what?”
“That I was unhappy.”
I frowned.
“You were sick.”
“Those are not the same thing.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because you were trying so hard.”
The answer irritated me.
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense when you love someone.”
“No. If something was wrong, you should have told me.”
“Would you have listened?”
“Yes.”
She raised one eyebrow.
I started to answer.
Then stopped.
Mom nodded.
“That’s what I thought.”
“I would have fixed it.”
“That is exactly the problem.”
Her voice wasn’t sharp.
That made it worse.
“You are always fixing things, Isaac.”
“That’s my job.”
“No. That’s your fear.”
I felt something inside me close.
Mom saw it happen.
She reached across the desk and touched my hand.
“When your father died, you became convinced that everything depended on you.”
“A lot of things did.”
“Yes. The company. The estate. People’s livelihoods. Me, to some extent.”
“To some extent?”
“You were twenty-eight years old, sweetheart. You should have been building a life, not inheriting everyone else’s.”
“I chose.”
“Did you?”
Her question sat between us.
My father died in the back seat of a car on Atlantic Avenue from a heart attack.
Not a bullet.
Not a rival family.
Not some dramatic ending worthy of the reputation surrounding him.
His heart simply stopped.
By sunrise the next morning, forty-seven men wanted to know what Isaac Mercer intended to do.
I had given them an answer.
I had been giving answers ever since.
Mom squeezed my fingers.
“I worry that you no longer know the difference between being needed and being loved.”
I pulled my hand away slowly.
“I think you’ve been spending too much time with Megan.”
Mom smiled.
“She says the same thing about you.”
That surprised me.
“What does she say?”
“That you’re impossible.”
“Anything else?”
“She says you have sad eyes.”
I stared at her.
Mom’s smile widened.
“Don’t look so terrified.”
“I’m going to fire her.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I might.”
“If you fire her, I’ll hire her myself.”
“With what money?”
Mom looked offended.
“Your father left me plenty.”
“I manage it.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a confession.”
For the first time that night, I laughed.
Quietly.
But it was enough.
Mom’s face softened.
Then she became serious again.
“There’s something else.”
I waited.
She looked toward the old bookshelves.
“Your father left me a box.”
I frowned.
“What box?”
“He gave it to me about six months before he died. He told me I was to keep it somewhere safe.”
“What was inside?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never opened it?”
“No.”
That sounded impossible.
My father trusted secrets the way other men trusted safes.
If he had given Mom something important, there was a reason.
“Where is it?”
Her fingers tightened slightly around the edge of her robe.
“That’s the problem.”
“What?”
“I don’t remember.”
The next morning, I postponed Boston.
For the first time in twelve years, three meetings were moved because I wanted to search my own house.
No one argued.
Megan arrived at eight carrying groceries.
She found me in the upstairs storage room with three boxes open around my feet.
She stopped in the doorway.
“Should I ask?”
“No.”
“All right.”
She started to leave.
“Megan.”
She turned.
“My mother mentioned a box.”
Her face changed.
Barely.
But again, I noticed.
“What kind of box?”
“I was hoping you knew.”
“I don’t.”
“You hesitated.”
“I was trying to remember whether she told me about one.”
“Did she?”
Megan set the grocery bag down.
“She mentioned losing something important.”
“When?”
“A few weeks ago.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“She didn’t want me to.”
I stared at her.
“That seems to be becoming a pattern.”
“She is an adult.”
“She is ill.”
“Those things can both be true.”
“You think keeping things from me is helping her?”
“I think respecting her choices helps her.”
“And if one of those choices puts her in danger?”
Megan’s eyes sharpened.
“Is the box dangerous?”
I didn’t answer.
She nodded slowly.
“Then maybe you should tell me what we’re looking for.”
I almost said no.
Instinct demanded it.
Information was leverage.
Leverage was survival.
But that instinct belonged to another world.
And somehow, standing among old Christmas decorations and dusty furniture, it felt ridiculous.
“My father gave it to her before he died.”
“What does it look like?”
“She doesn’t remember.”
“Then we aren’t looking for a box.”
May you like
“What are we looking for?”
“A memory.”
