He picked it up and saw Evangeline in the grainy black and white screen, changing Leo’s diaper. There was no man in the room with them.
“Hang on, Rory,” she said suddenly. “You’re on speaker, but I just have to focus for a sec, these little buttons always get me.”
She’s on the phone.
Who’s Rory?
Anger filled his chest and he had to take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Being single wasn’t a job prerequisite. Though the way she had been looking at him lately, he’d thought…
Well, whatever he’d thought, he’d been wrong to think it. And he should have known better anyway. A sweet girl like Evangeline wouldn’t have feelings for a man like him.
“Okay,” she said on the monitor, lifting Leo into her arms and holding him close. “Sorry about that. What’s going on?”
“I don’t want you to worry about me,” the man’s voice said warningly. “I’m gonna figure it out.”
Even through the tinny output on the monitor, Grayson could hear that Rory had a deep voice and a Philly accent. This was someone from her old life. The life she never really talked about.
“Figure what out?” Evangeline asked him, her voice pitching up.
“The gang wants more from me than I was hoping,” he replied.
The gang?
“More money?” Evangeline breathed.
“No,” he said flatly. “Different jobs.”
Grayson barely contained a growl. What kind of person was Evangeline involved with?
“Can you go to the police for help?” Evangeline asked.
“Well, funny story,” the man replied, irony clear in his voice. “Someone on the force actually went to the Department of Licenses. Turns out there’s no license to operate a business from Grandpa’s house. So if I don’t shut down the shop, they’ll shut me down, maybe even send the police back, and there will be huge fines—fines I can’t pay.”
“Why?” Evangeline asked.
“As far as I can figure it out, he didn’t apply for a license because even though a lot of East Cambria is commercially zoned, our block isn’t,” the man sighed. “He had friends everywhere, and they looked the other way back in Grandpa’s day. But there’s new blood on the force, and now that they found something to link the shop to the gang, they’re not going to take any chances.I talked to André, but there’s nothing he can do on this.”
“I can’t believe Grandpa didn’t have a license,” Evangeline said softly.
“Things were different in those days,” Grayson said. “And he was trying to give us the best life possible after Mom and Dad left. He couldn’t go back to the shipyard with no one to watch us at home. You know that. We would have wound up in the system.”
The whole thing shifted in Grayson’s mind and his breath caught in his throat.
This man wasn’t Evangeline’s boyfriend. He was herbrother.
“What are you going to do, Rory?” she was asking him. “Can you come here? I can’t promise anything, but my boss is a good man. I know he’ll help you try to find work?—”
“I’m not going to mess up a good thing for you, Buttons,” Rory said, cutting her off. “It sounds like you really like that guy, and the baby too.”
“But then where will you go?” she asked, her voice catching. “What will you do?”
There was silence for a moment, and Grayson found himself impatient for an answer to that question himself.
“Grandpa’s house is all we’ve got,” Rory said quietly after a moment. “If I have to close the shop, I’ll just find some other work.”
“There is no other work,” Evangeline said quietly. “And you’renotgoing to work for the gang.”
Grayson waited for him to argue that of course hewouldn’t work for the gang and to name another opportunity.
