Ugh.
I was more or less dating Mr. Pemberton.
I knew Gerard Pemberton through some lawyer friends, and we’d bumped into each other at several Massachusetts Bar Association networking events. He was an attorney at a firm where my law school buddy Simone worked, a firm that liked to paint itself as boutique but actually churned a massive volume of high-profile and high-priced divorces.
Gerard was good at that: portraying himself as something pleasant despite being a complete tool.
As fate would have it, Gerard was going through his own divorce now. He and his wife, Meredith, called it quits about six months ago and he was busy proving a point to her. He wanted Meredith to know that he’d moved on and he was better off without her, and he was going hard at sending those messages.
Apparently, I was good ‘get back at your ex-wife’ material, and he wanted to be seen all over town with me. I attributed one hundred percent of my appeal to the fact that the work of Walsh Associates was featured in seven different design and architecture publications in the past four months, and we were currently restoring a home for Eddie Turlan from the eighties punk band The Vials.
Gerard also wanted to fuck his anger away. Quite unfortunately for me, he had some trouble maintaining erections, and routinely blamed Meredith for that while we were in bed. It was charming to watch him berating his cock and cursing his ex.
That was one of the many reasons we didn’t get between the sheets too often.
I didn’t love Gerard, and I didn’t especially like him either. He talked constantly and with no regard for whether anyone was listening. He was rude in subtle, elegant ways that most people interpreted as highbrow snark.
There was always a segment on NPR or a golf tournament worth recounting, but at the very minimum, he kept me occupied. Despite his soliloquies, I always had a dinner date at the ready. He was pleasantly reliable…and barely tolerable, but the only objective for me was moving the fuck on.
“Would you like me to reschedule anything?” Tom asked.
I drummed my fingers on my armrests and shook my head, but I didn’t turn away from the windows. “No. Thank you, though.”
My eyes landed on the emerald agate geode on the corner of my bookshelf. It was just a rock with something remarkable hiding inside, and it appeared in my office six years ago without a card or return address. The only identifying information was a Brazilian postmark.
There were other mysterious geodes, too. Some were no bigger than a strawberry and others were the size of a softball, and they came with postmarks from all over the world. Russia. Austria. South Korea. Canada. Zambia.
Only one person who would drop rocks in the mail and send them my way without explanation. Someone who liked to remind me that I was a self-centered bitch who needed to take myself a hell of a lot less seriously.
Well, now there were two people who knew those things.
Yeah, today was going to be special.
*
Before sunset, I’dbought one property, sold another, and found two more to lust over. I wanted to snap them up before anyone else noticed the gorgeous—yet completely trashed—Public Garden-side brownstones, but this day wasn’t going well enough to make quick decisions.
A dish of gnocchi sat untouched in front of me, my glass of pinot grigio was growing warm, and I was drowning out Gerard’s commentary about wind farms. It could have just as easily been his position on the area’s best driving ranges or how he was diversifying his portfolio, but I wasn’t even close to listening.
Instead, I was debating whether we’d get a bigger payoff from merging the twin brownstones on Mount Vernon Street into a super-mansion or restoring them as they stood. This was the kind of project Matt lived for, and if I could get him on board, it would be huge for him. A twelve-thousand-square-foot structural remodel and preservation job meant an eight-figure price tag, and a sale like that translated to major publicity. It was exactly what Matt needed to finally grab some awards of his own and garner the media attention that Sam and Patrick picked up without effort.
“Dessert?” Gerard asked, gesturing to the menu the waitress was offering.
It took me a moment to realize he expected a response. Most of the time, he required no more than the occasional nod.
“No,” I said. I wanted my bed, pajamas, andGame of Thrones. Some Jon Snow would help my mood. “I have an early meeting.”
It wasn’t exactly false; all of my meetings were early relative to Gerard’s firm, where the partners strolled in around nine thirty. I texted Tom to get me on Matt’s calendar for a Mount Vernon Street visit tomorrow, and engrossed myself in looking busy with emails.
Gerard talked the entire walk back to my apartment—something about paleontologists discovering an ancient species of birds. Whipping the babble out of him wouldn’t have required much work on my part, but I didn’t have the desire to fix him. Everything about this was temporary, and when the emotionless boredom of my time with Gerard left my wounds scabbed over and my heart numb, this would end.
It was misery, but it was the best I could do right now.
The prehistoric bird story continued until I pointed to a chair in my living room and said, “Make yourself at home. I’m getting some wine.”
I grabbed a bottle from my pantry without concern for variety or origin and stood at the sink, gazing at the night sky. A nearly full harvest moon was shining bright over the Charles River, and it seemed too close, too heavy to be real.
Gerard called to me from the hall but I ignored him. There was probably a tennis match he thought I needed to see.
