Only I couldn’t.
Because I didn’t have any real friends. Only people I had business with and met with socially—only to make sure they didn’t screw up any of our mutual business shit.
“Well played, madam.”
She smiled and dashed out the door after saying her goodbyes, leaving Gerald and me to face each other. I took out another cigarette, waiting for the question on the tip of his tongue.
“So now it’s your turn to tell me … why?” he asked quietly, dropping his elbows to his knees. He looked broken. Wilted and weak and somehow still angry.
“Why did you put me through this? Why did you take everything I’ve ever cared for? What did I ever do to you, Brennan? Up until two months ago, I would name you as one of my closest business partners. Openly.”
Openly my ass. If he was so open about his business with me, he wouldn’t have forbade me from taking his daughter out for a coffee.
Not that that was what I wanted.
Or had anything to do with this bullshit.
“I found the letters,” I said, flicking ash into an ashtray on the table. “Catalina’s letters. Back in November. The old bat finally conked out, and her neighbor invited me to sort through her shit and see if there was anything of value there. Spoiler alert: there wasn’t. But she kept the letters to you. The ones you redirected back to her. And your photos together…” I took a deep breath “…and the pregnancy test. I know all about what you did to her, to me. How you drove her away from me. How you killed the child in her womb. My brother. I know everything. Everything. Everything.”
I said it three times, so he’d understand I meant business.
Gerald stared at me for a long beat. When he finally opened his mouth, no words came out.
He started to laugh.
Cackle was more like it.
And I mean, really go at it, slapping his thigh as he tried to regulate his breath, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye, shaking his head.
“You bought that bullshit?” He heaved. “Are you serious, son?”
“There were pictures, Gerald. Lots of them. Of you and Cat together. By the way, you should probably stop the habit of documenting every single fuck you have with women who are not your wife.”
The pictures were genuine. They were real. And they were damning. I knew a photoshopped work when I saw it, and this wasn’t it.
So why was I feeling like an idiot right now?
“No, I did have an affair with Cat, I’m not going to deny that part. Hell, Sam, you were a child, barely even old enough to wipe your own ass. I didn’t know you. And Cat was a gorgeous woman in her prime. Besides, she needed the money, and I paid her well for her … uh … company.” He looked away now, rubbing the back of his head.
There was no well-mannered way to point out someone’s mother was a whore, so I didn’t necessarily fault him for that. He carried on, exhaling quickly.
“I had an affair with her, yes, but everything else was a complete and utter fabrication. Catalina was never pregnant with my child, and I never raised a finger to hurt her. I did not cause her to miscarry. When we started seeing each other, she told me she had her tubes tied after she had you. I asked her to show me the doctor’s note—I knew Jane would rip my head off if I ever got any of my mistresses pregnant—and Cat provided it to me within the day. Not only that, but I went ahead and double-checked it with her OB-GYN.”
“Then what the fuck was that pregnancy test?”
“My guess is she took it from one of her friends. Catalina had a lot of friends in the … uh … industry she worked in. Kept women who messed around with rich men. We provided for them, but the main incentive was, of course, to fall pregnant with our children. That would tie us to them for life.”
I did not take that into consideration.
“So you are saying she was never pregnant with your child?” I drawled, trying to keep my cool.
He finished his whiskey in one go. “Correct.”
“That’s all nice and well, but I distinctly remember Cat coming back home around the time of the alleged miscarriage, disoriented and bruised. I remember her crawling into her bed, curling up into a ball, crying. I remember her being ushered to the hospital in an ambulance. How would you explain that?”
Gerald stared at me through beady, liquid black eyes, his lips sneering in distaste. “Does the name Donnie ring a bell?”
I shook my head slowly.
“Tall, muscular, an underwear model type. He was Cat’s real boyfriend at the time. The man she fucked without leaving an invoice on the nightstand afterward. Real good-looking guy, I’ll give him that, but he never came to terms with what she did for a living. Every now and again, he would rough her up if she showed up to meet him smelling like the man before him. As it happened, that man before him that night was me. I know, because I met your mother at the hospital and even paid for her hospital stay. I told her to press charges. She didn’t want to. I still have the receipt for that hospital bill, and I can show you none of the things listed there have anything to do with Cat’s womb or any of her reproductive organs.”