Page 155 of Broken Brothers

I meant every word that would follow.

“Claire, it hurts a little that you chose to say we need to end what we had, but I understood it. We had to become more professional for both of our sakes. But what has not been lost is that I like you and think you’re an awesome person. What happened to you, with all of your employees leaving?”

I looked around the room and leaned forward.

“I have good reason to believe this was a smear job by someone to take all of your employees. I can’t say why, mostly because I don’t know why someone would resort to this, but it’s nothing to do with you or your company. You know this, because you know the accusations levied against your company by former employees are all bullshit. You probably even saw it when you interviewed them!”

“A bit,” she admitted. “But what are you getting at?”

“What I’m getting at,” I said, followed by a pause to make sure I picked my next words exactly right. “Is that what happened with your employees leaving is not the source of the problem. It’s a symptom of the problem. And I’m going to doeverything I can to make it right. And once that’s taken care of? Your company can grow back to what it needs to be.”

“That’s all good,” Claire said, continuing to rub her eyes.She really does need a break from all of this. Jesus.“But…”

I stood up, went over to her, gently grabbed her face with my hands, and kissed her forehead.

“I promise that, you give me six months, and Rising Sun will either be back to where it was, or you can move on and I will never mention any of this to you again.”

Promise me…

Those two words, I swore, would either become the defining theme of my life or a cruel tease, a cursed reminder that what people said often had very little impact on what they actually did.

“I need to think about this, Chance, I can’t just commit to you and say yes now,” she said. “If I hadn’t seen you just now, there’s a decent chance I might have just said ‘fuck it’ and closed down shop before the month was out. But I’ll promise you this, then. I won’t shut anything down without coming to you first.”

“Good enough,” I said, knowing well enough this was not the spot to push my luck any favor. “Thank you, Claire.”

I leaned down again and kissed her on the forehead once more.

“Call me if anything comes up, OK?”

“I will,” Claire said, finally giving a sheepish smile that I had so come to admire over the previous stretch when we were together.

I left, giving her a gentle shoulder squeeze, wondering if this was a problem that I’d be able to live up to.

After all, the promises to believe in Layla and Morgan were ones that I was having a lot of trouble believing in these days. To love Layla, and to trust Morgan? At least loving Layla seemed somewhat conceivable, albeit not for some time. But Morgan?My brother, the one I’d formed MCH with, only to have it sold to the enemy?

Promise was a very loaded word for me right now. The fact that I had said it to Claire said something, in that either I was acting rashly and foolishly, as usual, or I really was turning the corner and living up to my own word.

For now, though, with a million dollars on me, I had to get home and to a secure location so I could better figure out what the hell to do with all this money.

64

The walk back home took less than fifteen minutes, and for all the times that I had walked the streets of New York City, I had never really felt threatened about being robbed or mugged. Part of it was because I didn’t dress in stupidly expensive clothes, trying to draw the eyes of the envious and the wrathful, but part of it was just because the streets weren’t as dangerous as the city’s reputation was to be believed, although certainly some parts were worse than others.

But having a check for literally a million bucks in your pocket has a way of making you pick up the pace and become a hell of a lot more paranoid than normal. I suppose that I should have already been this level of paranoid with everything Edwin had done to me, but this level of suspicion would have left me burned out within a day. Just the walk back home was enough to stress me out quite a bit—I couldn’t imagine carrying on all day with this.

When I returned to Layla’s apartment—this time, without the front desk trouble, thankfully—I found a clear surface, deposited the check with my phone, and took a couple of steps back. The money would take a few days to clear for obvious reasons, giventhe enormous amount of money in there, but the money was now out of the hands of physical thieves and evil-doers. I didn’t have anything to worry about other than Edwin lashing out with some legal babble about how it wasn’t his wife’s—soon to be ex-wife’s—money to give out.

Enough was enough, though. That shit could wait another day.

I plopped down on the couch, exhausted and a bit overwhelmed by all the positives that had happened today. I really had to take caution to make sure this didn’t go to my head, as today’s high would eventually create a steeper cliff to fall into tomorrow’s low on. I didn’t want that cliff to go too deep, either, as it would make getting up and out of it a bitch to deal with.

But still… a fucking million dollars. Even if I allocated half of that to Claire’s company, five hundred grand was more than enough to keep me going for a couple of years. Mom really had come through—now I just felt like an asshole for always calling her Mrs. Hunt all these years, never giving her the love and trust that she deserved.

Better late than never, I suppose.

At least someone in this world still cared about me. At least someone in this world, through thick and thin, through the good and the bad times, through everything would be there for me to help as needed.

At least—