60

C H A P T E R 1 7
N O A H
Then Tess asked to spend the night at a friend’s house that Friday evening, I readily agreed. It would be good
for both of us. Good for her to go out and have a good time, to get some of the troubles that had been plaguing her off her mind, and an opportunity for me to unwind a bit too.
I decided to call Eric. We hadn’t spoken since I’d basically hung up on him when I opened the door and found Jenna, and I still needed a sounding board for everything I’d learned about my father and his financial dalliances. Everything I’d been told. I still wasn’t at all sure I believed any of it.
Eric answered the phone on the third ring. “What’s up?” “How come you haven’t been answering my calls?” “How come I haven’t what now?”
“I’ve called you several times,” I explained. “Didn’t you see the missed calls?”
“I dunno. I guess I didn’t check my phone. You okay?”
“I…” Was I okay? That felt like a question with a complicated answer. “Are you free tonight?”
“Reckon so. What’d you have in mind?” “Well, to tell you the truth, I’d like to go out.”
Eric laughed, a hearty, booming ha! “You never want to go out.”
“That’s because I always run into clients and investors when I do, and they always want financial advice. Maybe if we go somewhere, I don’t know, outside Manhattan? Do you know anywhere?” If anyone did, it would be Eric. He’s probably been to every bar in the five boroughs.
“There’s a classy little joint in Brooklyn,” he said. “I just uncovered it last week, actually. It’s too new to be trendy yet, and none of your big shot clients will be on that side of the bridge on a Friday night.”
He was right about that. “What’s the address?” I asked. “I’ll meet you there.
Eric rattled off an address, and I scrawled it on a piece of paper and ripped it off the pad. Checking my pockets for my keys and wallet, I headed out to catch a cab.
Riding through the city at night was usually relaxing, but tonight I couldn’t seem to let go of my anxiety. Had my father really been the kind of person LM had suggested he was? Had I known the man at all?
Maybe he was trying to protect me from whatever nefarious illegal crap he was involved in. But would my own father really have put my name on the company if he’d known it would lead to people threatening me? He’d known I had a daughter to protect.
No matter how I turned it in my mind, I couldn’t get it to make sense.
The cab pulled to a stop in front of a black building with a red door and a neon sign. It looked sort of seedy, but that meant nothing. Eric had a habit of finding bars no one else wanted to go to. He favored places that looked like dives on the outside but were surprisingly nice when you opened the door.
And the bar was exactly that. The bar and tables were dark mahogany and the floor was a clean, well-kept hardwood. Pop music played at a moderate volume on the sound system. A few people were clustered in the back of the room around a pool table under a dim green light.
Eric sat at the bar, but when he saw me, he got to his feet, collected his drink, and followed me to one of the tables. “Hey, man,” he said. “What’s up?”
I shook my head. “This calls for a drink.”
Eric flagged the bartender. “You’ve got to try their microbrew,” he said. “It’s the best in Brooklyn.”
“This place is a microbrewery?”
“Yeah, all the stuff is in the back. They do tours during the day. A month from now it’s going to be overrun with tourists and we’ll have to find somewhere else to go.” The bartender appeared and set down a glass in front of me. “So what’s up? You sounded kind of worked up on the phone.”
“Eric, why have you been MIA for the past week?” I asked, putting my concerns aside for the moment.
“I’ve been around.”
“No you haven’t. And when you don’t return phone calls, it usually means you’re on a bender.” I waited until he looked in my eyes. “Are you okay?”
He laughed. “I’m fine. God, you really haven’t changed since college, have you?”
“Neither have you,” I told him pointedly.
“Relax,” he said. “I haven’t been doing anything I can’t handle.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you worry too much. Try the beer.”
I took a sip and had to admit it was good and just the release I needed. Warmth flooded my system, and suddenly the idea of LM and my father doing business didn’t seem so upsetting. “I was contacted by someone,” I told Eric.
“Oh yeah? By who?”
I was about to lay out the whole tale, to tell him about LM and his threats and his accusations about my father—but I was distracted by the tinkling of the bell over the door as someone came in. Reflexively, I turned to see the newcomer.
I almost fell off my chair.
Jenna was standing in the doorway.
My mind jumped to the illogical. Had she come here looking for me? Was she going to try again to ask me on a date? If she did, I reminded myself, I would have to tell her no. That had been hard enough the first time, and I definitely wasn’t excited about the prospect of doing it again. But it had to be done. It wasn’t safe for her to date me right now while I was being stalked by a creep with a camera.
But she looked just as shocked to see me as I was to see her. She hadn’t been looking for me at all. What were the odds of
both of us ending up in the same bar in Brooklyn? I didn’t even live in Brooklyn.
A girl with short spiky blond hair appeared behind Jenna. “What’s the holdup?” she asked, bumping her forward.
Jenna turned and whispered to her. The girl looked over Jenna’s shoulder, directly at me, and a smile broke across her face. She took Jenna by the hand and dragged her toward our table.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“What?” Eric was completely clueless as he turned.
Jenna and her friend had reached our table. Her friend was nudging her insistently in the back. Jenna smiled sheepishly at me. “Hey, Noah.”
“Hey. Good to see you again.” “You too. How’s Tess?”
“She’s good. Loving her new room.” I turned to Eric. “This is Jenna Robertson. She redecorated Tess’s bedroom for us.”
“Hi, I’m Eric.”
“Jenna,” she said. “And this is my friend Sara.” “Hey.” Sara waved at both of us.
Eric grinned. “Want to go see if we can get in on a game of pool, Sara?”
I tried to signal him with my eyes—don’t you fucking dare— but it was too late. Sara was already accepting his invitation. Eric held out his arm to her and she took it, and the two of them headed off to the pool table, both looking back over their shoulders at us as if they both knew we didn’t want to
be alone together. Even though I did want to be alone with her.
Jenna laughed ruefully and dropped into the seat vacated by Eric. “Well then.”
“I can’t believe those two,” I said.
“That’s pretty standard for Sara,” Jenna admitted. “She’s always trying to fix me up. She was the one who wanted me to ask you to Jessica’s wedding in the first place.”
“You didn’t want to ask me?” I frowned.
“No, I did,” Jenna hurried to clarify. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that Sara gave me the push. She does that a lot.”
“I guess that’s what best friends are for,” I mused.
She laughed. “I don’t know about that. She was supposed to take me out and distract me tonight.”
“Distract you? From what?” Had I made that much of an impression?
“Just some stuff I’ve got going on,” she said vaguely.
I waited, but she didn’t seem to want to discuss it further. Fair enough. “Should I get us drinks?”
“What are you drinking?” she asked.
“Microbrew. Eric says it’s amazing, but I’ve never much liked beer. To tell you the truth, I could go for a scotch.”
“I’ll take one of those,” Jenna said. “You drink scotch?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I drink it on occasion.”
“And this is the right occasion?” “Let’s find out.”
I went to the bar and ordered two glasses of top shelf scotch. Hopefully Jenna would be impressed. Then I checked myself. Why was I trying to impress her? Hadn’t I already decided we couldn’t date? Should I even be sitting next to her in the bar?
I shook it off and carried the scotch back to the table. No one was there to see us. We’d be fine. And we were only there together by coincidence anyway. It wasn’t like we’d planned it. When I’d picked her up for the wedding there had been conversations, an email trail—plenty of ways for LM to hack my life and figure out what I was doing. There was no way he could have tracked me here unless he had me under constant surveillance, which didn’t seem likely.
We drank our first round of scotch in near silence, but when Jenna came back with the second round, I felt loose and open. “I want you to know,” I said, sipping my new drink, “under ordinary circumstances, I definitely would have wanted to go out with you.”
She blushed, and I worried for a moment that she might get up and walk away. But she seemed to steel herself. “These circumstances aren’t ordinary?”
What to say? I couldn’t tell her about LM. “I just have a lot going on right now.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I was a little hesitant to ask in the first place. Not because of you or anything, but because I’m not sure I’m ready to get into a relationship right now.”
“Did you just get out of one or something?”
“Not that recently. About a year ago. But he was a dick. He was really controlling and pushy, always trying to dictate what we did and when we did it. And then he cheated on me.”
“What a bastard.”