Page 55 of Nobody's Fool

I can barely nod.

“If they find her body, we will both go to jail…”

“Have you told Molly?” Dad asks.

“Some of it.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. I didn’t want to lie about it.”

Dad nods. “What did she say?”

“She mentioned Tad Grayson.”

My father lowers his eyebrows. “Why?”

“She thinks it can’t be a coincidence. Seeing Anna. Tad Grayson getting released.”

Dad thinks hard, and as he does, I can see my own expression echoed in his face. “I don’t see how.”

“That’s what I said.”

“But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection,” he says. “Maybe we can do some quick research on it.”

“Research?”

“Where was Tad Grayson when you were in Spain? Has he ever been to Spain? Could his life have somehow intersected with Victoria Belmond’s?”

I make a face. “And he, what, kidnapped Victoria years before we crossed paths and dragged her to Spain and then came home and started dating the woman I’d eventually propose to and then he killed her while he continued to imprison Victoria Belmond for, I don’t know, another eight or nine years?”

My father leans back now. He has an old-fashioned. That’s his drink. He slowly takes a sip. “I have another suggestion.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s similar to what I told you back then.”

“You told me to move on, to forget it.”

Dad smiles. Like yours truly, he has a good smile. “Exactly.”

I don’t want to tell him what I’m thinking right now because it’s pretty bad. I also hate when people blame their parents for their own problems. But the truth is, I took Dad’s route back then. I tried to move on from Spain. I tried to forget. And how does a man do that? In my case—and I’m sure I’m not alone—you forget with the help of some sort of psychoactive substance. Again I’m not going to be so pat as to blame my father for my drinking. But is it okay to place some of the blame on whatever happened on that hot summer night on the Costa del Sol?

“We should all move to Florida,” my dad says. “St. Petersburg. Let’s be honest. There’s nothing left for you here. You put the NYPD behind you. You put Tad Grayson behind you. Now that you know she’s alive and well, you can even put Anna behind you too. We start anew. You remember my friend Akash? He opened a private security firm down there. He said he could use a guy with your experience. The salary starts at six figures.”

We see Molly slowly move back toward the table. She’s holding Henry, who gives me a big smile and stretches his arms toward me and does that “baby lean” from her grip. The cliché answer, the expected answer, is to tell my father no, that I’m not running away again, that I’m taking a stand, that this is my home, that I was born and raised here, all that. But that would be stubbornness on my part.

“Let me think about it,” I say.

“Okay.”

“And obviously talk to Molly.”

“Obviously. But how about this? Until you decide, you just let the past be.”

“It ruined me,” I say without thinking, regretting the words as soon as they leave my mouth, even before I see my father flinch as though I had slapped him.

“I don’t mean that,” I say quickly.