Happily Ever After: A Romance Collection

by Amelia Wilde

  “Sure,” he said cautiously. “Whatever you’re having is fine.”

  I did my best to ignore him as I went to the kitchen. I took out the small tray Jane and I kept above the refrigerator and loaded it up with two mugs, honey, spoons, and a small pitcher of milk. By the time the kettle whistled, all I had to do was pour it over the tea leaves in the pot and let it steep as I carried everything over to the coffee table.

  “Thanks, Skylar. This is really nice.”

  Continuing to ignore Brandon, I doctored my usual cup, taking extra time about it. Brandon followed my model, but it was clear by his awkward movements—the clash of his spoon against the porcelain mug, the way he dripped both honey and milk onto the tray—that he wasn’t used to fixing his own beverages. Typical, I thought ungraciously. I made no move to help, just sat back in my college-issued armchair, trying to ignore the fact that compared to Brandon’s plush furniture, mine was like sitting on a collection of lumpy rocks.

  Brandon pulled a wad of crumpled, damp papers from his back pocket and dropped them on the coffee table with a solid whack. We both stared at them for a moment before he sat back too. Our sips echoed through the room. Although I was determined not to break the standoff, my impatience got the best of me after a few minutes had passed.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “My divorce agreement. Or it was until this morning. Now she won’t sign.”

  The accusation wasn’t explicitly there, but I felt it anyway. Something had been ruined the second that woman had walked in on Brandon and me.

  “What—”

  “We’re separated,” Brandon cut me off. “We’ve been legally separated for over three years, since I originally filed.” He glanced over his mug with a raised eyebrow, as if daring me to contradict him. “I’ll show you the original if you want, Red—I’m mean, Skylar. The court dates are all online.”

  “Maybe,” I replied woodenly.

  We took a few more loud sips of tea, each waiting for the other to speak. Once again, I was the first to break.

  “Three years is a long time to be just separated,” I remarked.

  He knew what I meant: why aren’t you divorced yet?

  Brandon sighed. “She contested. We never had a prenup…I know, I know, but we were kids when we got married. I wasn’t worth much, and I was an idiot. And now, she wants half. It’s not that I mind paying her off, but I’d either have to dissolve a bunch of my assets, which would mean a lot of people losing their jobs, or I’d have to make her an executive board member of Ventures, which I’m absolutely not going to do.” He ran a hand through his hair, causing one side to stick out. “Thank God the company isn’t public yet. Then it would be a real fuckin’ mess.”

  I bit my lip, considering the thick stack of papers. “Because a three-year divorce isn’t a mess.”

  Brandon looked up wryly. “It’s never been tidy, that’s for sure.”

  I sighed. “So what happened? Why did you file for divorce?”

  He stared down at his mug, still almost completely full—he wasn’t much of a tea drinker. Ana made him coffee every morning.

  “Miranda’s father owned the fund where I got my first job. The story I told you before is true…but that’s not all I was doing back then.” Brandon looked up, his expression regretful. “You’re probably not going to like this other story, Skylar.”

  I twisted my lips to the side. “Well, I don’t like you very much right now anyway, so you might as well spill. It can’t get much worse.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He set his mug next to mine and then sat back, bracing one hand across his other arm tightly like he was preparing for a collision.

  “Like I told you before, I originally started working part time at the fund, learning the investment game,” he began. “But I was still a teenage shit, and when I was finished at MIT, part of me could never leave the old neighborhood behind. I don’t know why, maybe to prove something to myself, like that I hadn’t sold out my roots for a fancy degree or some bullshit like that. Like I told you before, I caught a lot of flak when I chose to stay with the Petersens. Maybe I was trying to make up for that. I don’t really know. Anyway, when I wasn’t at the fund, I was usually getting into trouble with my old friends.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  My voice was calm, but a red flag was waving internally. Considering my dad’s struggles, I had no desire to come anywhere near Boston’s seedy underground or anyone else who did.

  Brandon grimaced. “Fighting, mostly, and hustling billiards. Standard hooligan shit.”

  The pool table in his house now made more sense. Although it was hardly used, the room was an open invitation to his old gang of friends who never accepted the offer.

  “So, what happened next?” I asked.

  Brandon rubbed his face as if he were in physical pain, but continued. “So that was my life: trading by day, hustling at night. I was kind of a wunderkind at the firm, and Stan, Miranda’s dad, liked me. Took me six months to double his personal holdings, so he didn’t give a shit that I showed up hungover half the time or in the same wrinkled suit as the day before. When my first year was up, he promoted me to vice president, and that’s when I met Miranda.”

  They had met at a company mixer on Stan Keith’s estate in Chestnut Hill. All of the fund managers brought their families for the afternoon shindig, which would have been typically New England, right down to the white wine spritzers and croquet games for the kiddies. All the men wearing khaki pants and polo shirts; the women in shift dresses and pearls. And a twenty-one-year-old Brandon had shown up half-drunk in jeans, a t-shirt, and his Red Sox hat after a late night at the pool hall.

  “Miranda thought I was some asshole on the catering staff, come late to the party, and started chewing me out for it.”

  He smiled ruefully, looking over my shoulder at some invisible memory. I curled smaller into my chair and listened.

  “She didn’t get along with her old man. They fought like crazy, and she was at that age when all she wanted was to piss him off just because she could. So, when I told her to fuck herself, she yanked me into the kitchen pantry and took me up on the offer. It wasn’t until she dragged me out to show her dad what she’d done that she found out I actually worked for the bastard and was one of his most valuable employees.”

  I cringed, not wanting to imagine him with the angel-faced woman I’d seen today, but finding it all too easy. She was everything I wasn’t: willowy and lithe, skin like porcelain. Genteel. And very beautiful. In her early twenties, she must have been stunning. Just the idea was painful.

  “But I was still a world enough away to be the bad boy she needed,” Brandon continued, pulling me from my thoughts. “I didn’t give a shit about anything in those days—not my life, not the world around me, and certainly not Stan Keith. So, Miranda and I served a mutual purpose for each other—she was a distraction for me, a way of showing Stan he didn’t own me, and I was a way of getting her father’s attention.”

  “But she fell in love with you anyway?”

  The words clipped at my heart as I said them, but I could see where the story was going. It was a damn Billy Joel song. Uptown girl falls in love with a downtown boy and tries to make him over. And, if his closet full of suits was any indication, she mostly succeeded.

  Brandon nodded sadly. “Unfortunately, yes. And as fucked up as I was, Skylar, it felt really good to have someone like Miranda—someone who was beautiful, who came from a good family, a person of substance—love me. She knew where I was from, and she still loved me. Maybe she even loved me because of where I was from.”

  I could see it. I didn’t like it, but I could see it. Brandon had struggled all his life for approval, still so clearly yearned for the kind of unconditional love he should have gotten as a kid. I could completely understand how at twenty-one, he could have easily confused the way a girl made him feel about himself with genuine love for her. But was that my own assumptions talking? I did
n’t really want to know the truth, but I had to ask.

  “Did you love her back?” My voice was soft, with a slight waver.

  “I wanted to.” His voice was low, his eyes full of pain. “Poor Miranda. Stan was the real genius. He knew I was no good from the get-go, but I wonder if that’s actually why he encouraged my relationship with his daughter. He knew I’d fuck up enough one day to the point I’d need him to get me out of trouble, indebting me and my talents to him for good. All he needed to do was wait.”

  It didn’t take long. After dating Miranda for six months or so, trouble found him and his Dorchester crew when a billiards game went bad.

  “We got cocky. I didn’t give a shit if we made money at that point—I was only doing it for kicks, you know? When we started to gain a rep, I was ready to bow out, but some of the guys depended on it, the ones who couldn’t hold down a job or who already had a record.”

  One night Brandon and his friends were challenged by an unknown player named Ricky O’Neill, who showed up himself looking to hustle. When Brandon beat him, O’Neill lost his temper and pulled a knife. He left after the bar owner tossed them all out, but that wasn’t the end of it.

  Brandon leaned forward over his knees. His South Boston accent thickened the longer he told his story. “Later that night, when we’re all hanging at Mickey and Doug’s place, there’s this knock at the front door. We all look at each other, knowing this ain’t good news since it’s fuckin’ three in the morning. We’re drunk, of course, and before we get our act together enough to duck out the back, the door busts open and O’Neill comes chargin’ in with five other guys, all of ’em Westies.”

  Ricky ended up being a member of the now-defunct West End gang, the criminal group headed up by Whitney Bulgar in the eighties. They didn’t do much now, but there were a few remnants who acted as envoys from local Mafia and even some of the heads in New York.

  I shivered, even though I wasn’t the one still soaking wet. “So, what happened?”

  Brandon buried his face in his palms. “About what you’d expect. They had guns, we had a few too. They shot my friend John, but we got O’Neill before the cops showed up. Everyone bailed out the back.”

  They had run away from the two dead bodies lying in the run-down apartment in Field’s Corner, but the cops had caught up with two of the men from O’Neill’s crew, and both of them had sang like canaries.

  “Did...” I paused, almost afraid to ask. But I had to. “Did...you...kill—”

  “No,” Brandon said flatly. He looked up, eyes unblinking and hard. “No. I promise you that, Skylar, I never killed anyone. But I did throw a few punches, and I was definitely a witness, you know? Or an aid to murder, depending on which side of the prosecution you’re on.”

  Now chilled to the core, I pulled a blanket from the back of my chair and spread it over my legs. Brandon continued to sit stone-still, like he couldn’t feel the goose bumps that had risen all over his ruddy skin.

  “So, what happened next?” I asked.

  “Well, Miranda’s dad got what he wanted. While Doug and Mickey had to make do with burnt-out public defenders, Stan bankrolled my criminal defense. In exchange, of course, for a ten-year contract at the fund and non-compete agreement for just as long if I was fired.”

  “Ray and Susan couldn’t help?”

  Brandon shook his head. “Ray’s a poor professor, and Susan doesn’t work. So, no, they couldn’t help, but they were fed up with my shit by that point anyway, especially Ray. When Stan stepped in, I would have been a fool to say no. But here’s the real kicker: he didn’t just pay for the lawyer. He had Miranda act as my alibi.”

  The fine lines around Brandon’s eyes suddenly seemed more evident. I gripped the blanket, resisting the urge to go and wrap my arms around his shoulders, pull his head into my lap, and smooth the anguish that I saw. But I needed to hear the rest of this story.

  “It wasn’t right,” Brandon continued. “I know that. He traded his daughter for the promise of millions in revenue, and she was willing because she loved me. Stan knew my potential better than I did. I was only twenty-one, and for the first time in my life, really fucking scared. My friends were too good to rat me out, and Miranda’s alibi made the Westies’ testimonies sound like petty gang rivalry. I didn’t want a record, so I let her cover for me and signed the agreement. And while my two best friends got time—Doug got two and a half years for assault with intent while Mickey got twenty for voluntary manslaughter—I got off scot-free.”

  Well, that explained why he didn’t see them anymore. He’d told Messina that they were both still in jail—Doug must have done something else after getting out the first time.

  “So, you married Miranda for her alibi?”

  The tension in Brandon’s shoulders released a little now that the story was coming to an end. “In a way, I guess I did. And I seemed to make her happy, especially when I quit hanging out in Dorchester and decided to go to law school with Stan’s blessing. So, when she started talking marriage, I said okay. We had a big white wedding. Church, reception, the works. She looked like a princess, and I was a frog dressed like a prince.” He paused, caught up again in the memories. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

  “How old were you by then?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  I could see it clearly: fourteen years ago, before he’d quite learned the veneer and polish that wealth brought, trussed up in a tuxedo that hung from a slightly lankier frame. I also had no problem envisioning Miranda in a Vera Wang confection, carrying pristine peonies and tippling champagne with equally pristine guests. It was a world I could only imagine from movies and novels—never one I’d ever known or wanted. I wondered if, despite his initial desire to escape the threat of the poverty of his youth, Brandon had ever really wanted that kind of opulence too. The kind of opulence that now characterized his life.

  “But it didn’t last.” I spoke quietly, more to myself than to him.

  “No,” Brandon said. “It didn’t.”

  I didn’t say anything, just waited for him to finish the story. He sighed and kept going.

  “Stan died about five years after the wedding. Pancreatic cancer. Just after instating me as the president of the fund. He also signed the business over to me before he died, a sort of mea culpa, I guess. By that point, I was ready for the challenge. I had finished law school and started Sterling Grove. When Stan died, I disintegrated the fund and used the capital to start Ventures too. Things took off pretty quickly after that. Miranda…well, she liked the money, but she didn’t like the hours two businesses like that took. And when she couldn’t have kids, well…she didn’t like that either. But not as much as she didn’t like divorce.”

  After trying everything short of adoption, Brandon and Miranda had agreed somewhat tacitly to live their lives apart while maintaining their marriage publicly. Miranda spent most of her time in a penthouse in New York, only coming to Boston for family functions or occasionally to see Brandon.

  I filed that fact aside. Brandon made it seem like the fire had gone out between them long ago—or was never there to begin with—but it was obvious to me that Miranda Sterling née Keith still was and always had been very much in love with her husband.

  Brandon, meanwhile, stayed on Beacon Street and continued to invest energy into the companies, which had quickly blossomed into some of the top law and investment firms on the East Coast.

  I rubbed my forehead and sighed. As angry as I was to find that he had a wife, I couldn’t help but sympathize with his situation. I knew just what kind of passion, kindness, and dedication Brandon was capable of, so I could hardly blame another woman for seeing it too. It was part of what had made me fall in love with him.

  Love. The word rang through my head with the subtlety of a church bell. We had said it to each other only last night, and then he had shouted it in front of half of Harvard Law maybe an hour ago. The words had been spontaneous, and I hadn’t yet processed exactly what
they meant. But Brandon’s eyes implored with such obvious desperation that I knew that I was still head over heels. There was no way I couldn’t love this man, history and all.

  The thought was terrifying.

  “So, what happened next?”

  Brandon clapped his hands together. How he wasn’t shivering was beyond me. The man was a furnace.

  “Everything and nothing, if you know what I mean. I was having dinner with Ray and Susan one night. Susan made her roasted chicken, which is Ray’s all-time favorite meal. Ray isn’t the most affectionate person, as you know, but I remember, when she set it down in front of him, he gave her this look. And she blushed about ten shades of red.” Brandon smirked. “About the same as your hair.”

  I chucked a throw pillow at him, which Brandon caught easily and laid in his lap like nothing had happened.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “I just remember thinking that I was never going to do that with Miranda. She’d never make me a chicken that would make me look at her like that—she might have loved me, but I doubt she even knows what my favorite meal is—and I’d never look at her with that kind of love.”

  “What is it?” I asked in spite of my determination to remain stoic. “Your favorite meal?”

  Brandon looked up with a shy smile that had me working very hard not to launch across the couch. “Eggplant parm,” he said softly. “With extra mozzarella. You?”

  “Matzo ball soup,” I replied. “The kind my bubbe makes, or from the B & H if you can’t get her recipe.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Um, okay.”

  We blinked at each other, unable to fight the heat growing between us.

  “Right,” I said, finally forcing myself to look away. At the wall. The bland furniture. Anything but those earnest baby blues. “Continue.”

  Brandon sighed, obviously ready to be done with the story. “Well, that was pretty much that. I was thirty-four, eleven years into a sham marriage, and ready to live my own damn life. I asked Miranda for a divorce, but she said no. We’ve been fighting on and off since then, but I hadn’t pressed the matter until recently. We, ah, were supposed to have our final mediation with the lawyers on Monday.” Brandon looked up with a particularly forlorn expression. “She was going to sign the papers.”