by Lauren Layne
“Ms. Powell.”
She looked up, blue eyes wide and indignant. “I’m sorry?”
“Naomi Powell. She’s my vote.”
Ruth’s mouth dropped open. “But, Ollie. Surely you can see—”
“What can I say, Ruth?” Oliver gave his best smile, ignoring her use of his hated childhood nickname. “I, too, am a male on the board.”
“You cannot be serious,” she said as he started to close the door. “You can’t choose your neighbor simply because she’s a dish.”
He choked out a laugh. “A dish?”
“Or whatever the kids call it these days. A hottie.”
“Good night, Ruth,” Oliver said gently but firmly as he shut the door.
He heard the familiar crack of the remote hitting the wall behind the TV, followed by his father muttering obscenities at the second-base umpire.
Oliver let his forehead rest on the door just for a minute.
Despite what his mother’s former best friend thought, he hadn’t chosen Naomi because she was eye candy. He’s chosen her because she was interesting. A puzzle he had every intention of solving.
Because what Oliver really needed more than anything?
A distraction from his own life.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6
I’m still confused. I thought you were moving downtown,” Claire said, carefully handling a cheap glass vase that probably cost less than the packing material it was wrapped in.
“I thought so, too,” Naomi said, opening yet another moving box and then sliding the box cutter back into the back pocket of her oldest jeans that were reserved for horrors like moving.
She didn’t tell her friend that she actually had purchased this apartment and signed a lease on the Tribeca high-rise. Having more money than one knew what to do with was a cushy problem to have. Most of the time.
Apparently, it also enabled her to make really, really stupid decisions. Like moving into an old building, with even older neighbors, in a snobby part of town just so she could come face-to-face with the man who’d all but destroyed her mother. To make Walter Cunningham see that he’d knocked her down, but not out.
And maybe to finish what she’d started with Oliver Cunningham. Whatever that had been.
“You guys really didn’t have to come over,” Naomi said for the third time as she half-heartedly began unpacking some plates.
“Are you kidding?” Claire said, diving into the box she was unpacking. “This is sort of my fantasy.”
“What, packing peanuts?” Audrey asked, taking a sip of white wine and wrinkling her nose at the box of knickknacks she’d been unpacking at record-slow speed.
“No, I just love new places.”
“I don’t quite know that new is the word I’d use to describe 517 Park,” Naomi said, beginning to place her assortment of mugs with motivation girl-boss-esque notes in one of the cabinets. “We could add up all three of our ages, and I think the building still has us beat.”
“You know what I mean,” Claire said. “New to you. It’s a fresh start. A brand-new place to live.”
“Why this building?” Audrey asked curiously. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s gorgeous in a stately, prewar kind of way, but you seem too hip for the Upper East Side. And as someone born and raised on Madison, I know what I’m talking about.”
“I’ll echo that sentiment,” Claire said, grabbing Audrey’s wine out of her hand and taking a sip. “I’m a Connecticut girl by birth, but I’ve lived on the Upper East for six years now, and you’re way too cool for us.”
“Trust me, I’m really not cool,” Naomi said. “I can name just about every Star Trek character, ever, and that includes the much-maligned Enterprise series.”
“Okay, I don’t really know what that means,” Audrey said, going to the fridge to retrieve the bottle of chardonnay. “But even that’s cool. Your confidence about it. And look at what you’re wearing.”
Naomi glanced down at her ripped black jeans and fitted black T-shirt with Slay written across the front. “Seriously? This?”
“Cool,” Audrey repeated, pointing the wine bottle at her. “Now, where are your wineglasses?”
“I only seem to have unpacked the one,” Naomi said, looking around at the mass of boxes and tissue paper. “And I gave it to you.”
Audrey pulled down two mugs and filled them liberally with wine, handing one to Naomi and taking the other to Claire before refilling her own stemmed glass.
“So?” Claire asked as Audrey put the bottle back in the fridge.
“So what?” Naomi took a sip from the mug and smiled, remembering her early twenties when wine from a coffee mug was pretty much the status quo because her kitchenware contained about three glasses, total, and a wineglass wasn’t one of them.
“Why here?” Claire repeated Audrey’s question, which Naomi had yet to answer.
Naomi set the mug aside and reached into the box to pull out a small carafe she usually used for juice. “I used to live here.”
Both Audrey and Claire looked up from their respective boxes. “What?”
“Here?” Audrey said, using her glass to gesture at the messy space.
“Well, not this particular apartment.” Naomi set the carafe on a shelf more carefully than she needed to. Buying time and wondering if she was ready for this story. Or if her friends were.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Claire said, apparently noting Naomi’s apprehension.
Audrey nodded in agreement.
“Eh. I might as well get it over with,” Naomi said with a shrug. “Better you guys know what you’re dealing with now rather than later.”
She picked up her wine mug and gestured at the small kitchen table by the window. Much of her furniture was still covered in the protective plastic wrap it had been moved in, but the kitchen chairs were accessible.
Naomi shoved off a couple of boxes and sat in one of the chairs, curling her right leg beneath her.
Audrey and Claire joined her, wineglass and mug in hand.
“Wait, do we need cheese for this?” Audrey asked as she plopped into the chair. “Because I can have some ordered, like, ASAP.”
“You mean you just order cheese?” Claire asked, giving her an incredulous look. “Like, a block of cheddar?”
“No, like . . .” Audrey gestured at the table with her hands. “A plate. A cheese plate. A fancy one. My favorite place is right around the corner, and they deliver.”
“God, I love Manhattan. Make it so,” Naomi said. “I’ve got lots more wine . . . somewhere.”
Audrey busily started tapping something on her phone. “Aaand . . . done.” She set her phone on the table, screen down. “Cheese will be here in thirty minutes or so. Now. Speak.”
“I don’t even know where to start with this,” Naomi said, plunging her fingers into her hair and tugging just slightly in agitation, trying to quiet her thoughts.
“All right,” Claire said quietly. “You said you used to live here. How old were you?”
“Nine when I moved in,” Naomi said without hesitation.
“Which apartment?”
“Five E. There are only five units on each floor, A through E. E’s the largest, with four bedrooms, three bathrooms plus a powder room, separate dining area . . .”
“So, fancy New York,” Audrey said with a comprehending nod.
“Very. Unfortunately, my family wasn’t the fancy one.”
“But if you lived here . . .” Audrey trailed off in confusion.
“One of those four bedrooms I mentioned? I shared it with my mother. Who was the housekeeper of the family that lived there.”
“Naomi,” Claire said softy. “Please tell me you’re not ashamed of that. It’s perfectly respectable.”
“I’m not,” Naomi said, using her finger to flip the handle of her wine mug one way, then the other. Back and forth.
“But”—she looked up—“that’s also not the ugly part. I mean, don’t get me
wrong, a stubborn, high-energy third grader having to share a tiny room with her equally stubborn and high-energy mother wasn’t exactly a pretty picture. But sometimes I like to imagine that she and I could have gone down the Gilmore Girls path. BFFs, or whatever.”
“You didn’t?” Claire asked.
“Definitely not.” She blew out a breath and took another sip of wine. “Okay, short version? My mom was a wildly mediocre housekeeper, and I’m sure if the woman who had hired her had been around, her job wouldn’t have lasted a week. But. The lady of the house, as she called herself, no joke, was gone most of the time caring for her sick mother in Newport, or some other fancy place.”
“Uh-oh,” Audrey said softly.
“Right?” Naomi said, her smile brittle. “It has all the elements of a thoroughly unimaginative movie.”
“Wait, what am I missing?” Claire asked.
“I’m guessing Naomi’s going to tell us next that while her female employer was gone all the time, her male employer was very much around.”
“Oh. Ohhhh,” Claire said, hazel eyes widening in comprehension.
“Yeah. In the cliché of all clichés, he was banging the help. And the help was a very willing participant.”
“Did you know? I mean, while it was going on?”
Naomi’s shoulders lifted. “I mean, sort of? I was nine and didn’t care enough about sex and relationships to really register that my mom often put me to bed and then wouldn’t come back to our room until much later in the evening. If she came back at all. I think maybe I told myself that she was sleeping on the couch or something to give me some space. I don’t know if it was self-protection or what . . .”
Naomi trailed off and gathered her thoughts before forging ahead.
“Anyway. Whether my ignorance was intentional or not, I lost all ability to pretend it wasn’t happening when I caught them together.”
“Oooof,” Audrey said with a wince.
“Yeah. Just, you know, banging in the kitchen like it was no big deal.”
“While you were there? In the apartment?”
“To be kind of fair, they thought I’d gone to the park to play. Rather, they’d sent me to the park to play.”
“Alone?” Claire’s nose wrinkled. “And you were nine?”
“No. Though I wish I’d been alone. Instead they sent me with my mom’s employer’s son. He was a year older, and we got along never. He was the spoiled rich brat who was both older and taller than the housekeeper’s dorky daughter. I was also a brat, except the mouthy, defensive kind who was all too aware of her secondhand clothes and crooked teeth and donated schoolbooks. Plus, let’s be honest. Even in the best of circumstances, boys and girls don’t get along at that age, and these were not good circumstances. I mean, he called me Carrots.”
“Oh, how very Anne of Green Gables!” Claire said.
“No,” Naomi said, lifting a finger, knowing exactly to whom Claire was referring. All redheaded girls were familiar with their soul sister Anne Shirley. Pippi Longstocking, too. “I assure you, this is no Gilbert Blythe scenario.”
“Wait, huh?” Audrey asked, looking between them. “Who’s Gilbert Blythe?”
“Movie night, my house,” Claire said. “You’ll just die from the romance of it. But sorry, Naomi. Continue. You and the non-Gilbert tormenter were at the park . . .”
“Right,” Naomi said, lost in thought as she went back to that long-ago day. “I don’t think either of us realized that they were just trying to get us out of the house, so when our instructions to ‘go kick the soccer ball around’ only got as far as me throwing it at his head and him throwing it right back and breaking my glasses, I went home in tears that I’d tried desperately to hide. He followed me, because even after all of that, he couldn’t let me have my dignity.”
“Or maybe he felt guilty,” Claire supplied.
Naomi gave her a glare.
“Or not,” Claire muttered into her mug.
“And you guys walked in on your parents doing it,” Audrey said in a slightly awed tone.
“Bingo,” Naomi said, shooting her temple with a finger pistol. “Scarred for life.”
“What’d they do?” Claire asked. “Your mom and his dad?”
“There was a lot of profanity from him. I vaguely remember screaming, while my mom hurriedly tucked her tits back into her shirt and dragged me into the bedroom begging me not to tell anyone.”
“Did you?”
“No! I was too embarrassed. I’d seen my mom’s boobs and her boss’s thing. That was about as far as my thoughts on it went. Doesn’t matter though. His wife somehow figured it out anyway a few days after that.”
“Oh, sweetie.”
“That’s not even the worst part,” Naomi said, gripping the mug so hard she was surprised it didn’t shatter. “This woman, his wife, was screaming her suspicions at her husband and my mother, which, you know, I guess that was to be expected. But instead of handling it like a man and telling his wife what really happened, the asshole denied the whole thing.”
“No,” Audrey said, wide-eyed.
Naomi nodded. “Yup. He claimed that my mother was a whore—that was his precise word—who’d tried her hardest to seduce him, but that he’d never touch trash.”
“The liar!” Audrey breathed in outrage. “That jerk!”
“Yeah,” Naomi replied, voice flat. “That’s what I said. But I was the only one in the room who spoke the truth. Even my mom didn’t say a single word in her defense. She just stood there, staring at him, and it was like . . . it was like she’d died inside at that very moment. I think she loved the guy.” Naomi shuddered. “I begged the son to tell his mom what we’d seen, but he just stood there and said he didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Naomi shrugged. “Needless to say, we were out on the street the next day.”
“That’s appalling. Why would you want to come back?” Claire said.
Naomi let out a laugh. “I don’t know that I did. But my mom never let it go. Those people blacklisted her, which meant she could never get another housekeeping job. Not that she was that good at it to begin with, but after that she just sort of quit trying at everything.”
She took a sip of her wine and continued. “I knew she held on to her bitterness, but I didn’t realize how much until the building called me about my application to live here.”
“Which I’m guessing you didn’t fill out,” Audrey said.
Naomi shook her head. “My mom did before she died. She always said she wanted them to see what I’d become. I never intended to see the application through, but next thing I know, I made it through interviews, and then I was signing the paperwork . . .”
She wasn’t sure which was more of a mystery: that Oliver Cunningham had passed her on to the next round after their disastrous meeting, or that she’d pursued the process.
“You wanted closure,” Claire said softly. “It’s understandable.”
Naomi met her friend’s eyes and saw what Claire wasn’t saying. That she understood because she too wanted closure. Though judging from the still-present shadows under her friend’s pretty hazel eyes, Claire was a long way off from making peace with Brayden’s betrayal and death.
“I guess so.” Naomi shrugged in agreement. “I know it’s stupid to be hung up on something that happened twenty years ago, but it’s always haunted me. Not as much as my mom, but people shouldn’t get to act like that.”
There was a long moment of silence, interrupted by a knock at the door that had all three women jumping slightly. Audrey hopped up. “Ooh. There’s our cheese!”
Audrey went to the door, Louboutins clicking on the hardwood as she opened the front door. You had to admire a woman who wore four-inch heels on moving day and got a composed cheese plate delivered.
“Oh. Hello there! You’re not cheese.”
A masculine chuckle came from the other side of the door, then a low voice irritatingly familiar. “No, ma’am. And if that’s what you were
expecting, this champagne might be a disappointment.”
“It’s Dom,” Audrey told the man cheerfully, with a quick look at the bottle. “That’s never a disappointment. You must be here to see Naomi?”
Naomi stood up as Oliver Cunningham stepped into her living room, looking obscenely expensive in a sleek gray suit, a two-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne in hand.
She swallowed, suddenly very aware of her ratty jeans and T-shirt. It was annoying as heck that this man could make her feel like a nine-year-old again, wanting desperately to belong in his world.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said with a slight smile. “Just wanted to say welcome to the neighborhood. We could use some fresh blood around here.”
So that was how it was going to be. He was playing nice, as though they hadn’t been like oil and water at her interview for this apartment. As though he hadn’t made her childhood completely miserable.
Naomi didn’t smile back.
And it took all of her self-control not to retort that she wasn’t fresh blood at 517 Park Avenue, and if anyone should know that, it should be Oliver Cunningham. After all, it had been his casual lie that had damned Naomi and her mother all those years ago.
But judging from his bland smile? He still didn’t have a clue that he was standing face-to-face with the childhood nemesis who’d once thrown a soccer ball at his face.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6
Oliver didn’t have sisters, but he’d had enough girlfriends over the course of his life to know when to tread carefully. Stumbling unwittingly into a girls’ night was one of those times.
The pretty brunette who’d answered the door seemed friendly enough. Tall and slim, she had a refined prettiness that reminded him of the girls he’d gone to prep school with. Thankfully though, her smile was genuine and refreshingly free of the snobbishness he so often saw among what he thought of as the “headband set”: girls whose primary goal had been shiny hair, Ivy League, and marrying money.
But while the brunette was friendly, the redhead he’d come to see in the first place looked . . . well, ready to shank him.