“Is this safe?” Meredith asked.
But she was already getting out of the car. She was already heading for the stairs and up to the private cabin and the glass of champagne waiting for her.
It was like watching a switch go on: She was enjoying herself, for the first time in a long time. And Nicholas loved seeing it.
At the airport in Miami, a black car was waiting. It drove Nicholas and Meredith to their oceanfront hotel to freshen up and then to the exit for Frank’s compound on Fisher Island.
Fisher Island was a gated community that put most gated communities to shame. You needed to board a security-guarded ferry to even get to it. And you needed an invitation to even get on that ferry.
When the ferry arrived on the island, they were greeted by additional security who took them by golf cart down the palm tree–landscaped roads (lush residences, tropical plants, and windblown foliage) until they got to the far end of the island—where Frank’s stunning house sat perched overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay.
It was the largest house on the island, but somehow the most welcoming with its blue shutters and flowers on the windowsills, a large oak door.
Frank and his wife, Jenny, and their children were waiting for them in the sunroom with cocktails being stirred and bowls of olives and oven-warm rosemary nuts. And, of course, those ocean views.
Frank was only a few years older than Nicholas, but he could have been a decade older. He was dressed in a pressed button-down shirt and khakis, relaxed loafers.
Jenny was in a white sundress, no shoes. And very pregnant. Pregnant for the fourth time.Twins this go-round, she said.
Their kids were bouncing around the sunroom and the backyard just beyond it, like a photograph of a happy family. There was an adorable blond and curly-haired daughter named Quinn, and her two younger brothers, Teddy and Dominic.
Jenny reached for Meredith, took her by the shoulders. “You’re not going to believe this, but I grew up not too far from you and your husband here,” she said.
“Really?” Meredith said, unable to hide her surprise.
“Your maiden name is Smith, yes?”
“Yes.”
“My maiden name is Delaney,” she said. Then she turned to Nicholas. “Your brother Sam was a grade behind me, I think. Or two grades maybe? I can’t remember… but I recognized your name straightaway. And I knew you from the football team. Everyone knew you from the football team. What are the odds, right?”
A Texas city of eighty thousand people, a high school of fewer than five hundred. Nicholas and Meredith and Jenny among the few who managed to find their way out. To find their way to somewhere better. To, somehow, find their way to each other.
What were the odds? Not high, Nicholas knew. And yet, the older he was getting, the more it felt to him like further proof. We end up where we start.
So even if it didn’t all feel destined, it certainly did make Jenny seem knowable, familiar. It made Frank seem that way by association. Frank who was on the ground with his kids, tending to them in a way that was disarming to Nicholas—breaking apart LEGOs and zipping up a doll’s dress.
This was the head of a crime empire? He seemed like a smitten family man.
Of course, though, you could be both.
The kids ran into the family room to watchSuperman IIon the VHS. And Jenny took Meredith’s arm, locked it in her own, steering her out toward two Adirondack chairs on the far end of the backyard, to sip on white wine, to talk about friends they used to have in common. To start down the road they naturally seemed like they both wanted to be walking down.
And Nicholas was alone with Frank. Frank who’d been down on the floor playing with his kids.
In a moment, Frank would tell Nicholas to have a seat on one side of the sunroom table, Frank handing him a cocktail and sitting down across from him. In a moment, Frank would lean back in that chair and start the conversation he’d asked Nicholas to fly fifteen hundred miles to have in person.
Nicholas was ready for this. He expected Frank to lay out the case for why he should do this: Everyone deserved a fair defense; criminal defense lawyers represented criminals; Nicholas taking a few cases a year for the organization would mean he could keep doing the meaningful work he loved, for people who needed someone like him to care; the organization had in-house counsel, so this was more of a consulting role, which would allow Nicholas to stay near his home and take care of his family, and family (they could both agree, couldn’t they?) was everything to them.
But Frank didn’t do any of that. He merely slid a folder across the table and waited for Nicholas to open it. Inside the folder was a list of every client the tony firm in Houston represented—the firm that had offered Nicholas a job.
Nicholas scanned the client list, the cases: corporations destroying the environment, hedge funders stealing retirement funds, sociopathic sons of billionaires. Rapists and murderers and extortionists. All the awful people that Nicholas would be expected to save, simply because they had the money to be saved. The people he’d have to fight for 120 hours a week. Until it killed him.
Nicholas looked up from the folder. It took a lot to surprise him and he was focused on not showing it, on not giving that away. Which might be why it didn’t occur to Nicholas, until later that night, in his oceanfront hotel room, that he had no idea how Frank knew about the job offer in the first place.
But they were a step before all of that anyway. They were at the step where everything changed.
Frank stood up. And he put out his hand.
