Gianna
Hey, it was good seeing you today. Hope your meeting prep goes well.
I stared at it for a full minute.
Then deleted it without sending.
If he wanted to talk to me, he knew how to reach me. I wasn’t going to chase someone who was running away.
I set my phone on my nightstand and tried to force myself to sleep.
I’d stop thinking about Archie and his canceled dinners and his sudden exits.
I barely even knew him,I reminded myself. That we’d spent one night together three years ago and had coffee once and an awkward conversation at a networking event wasn’t enough to know someone.
But as I drifted off to sleep, my mind circled back to that moment when Archie’s eyes had held something that almost looked like fear.
CHAPTER 7
Archer
I couldn’t stop hearingher voice.
“They don’t just take homes. They unravel entire lives.”
I stood in my office. The room was dark but I didn’t turn on the lights. I didn't need them. I knew exactly where it was.
The framed photograph on the wall—an eight-by-ten of the Sunset Park building after renovations: sleek glass facade, modern lines, luxury condos that sold for three times what the original units had cost.
My proudest achievement.
I’d hung it there six years ago, right after the project wrapped. Looked at it every day and felt satisfied. Accomplished. Like I’d finally proven I deserved my father’s legacy.
Now I looked at it and saw fifty-two families instead of profit margins. Saw Gianna at twenty-two, watching her father die and her mother fall apart and her entire future fold up like a map she’d never get to follow.
My hands weren’t steady when I lifted the frame off the wall.
Ten years ago
I was twenty-six and I was drowning.
My father had been dead for six months. One minute he was reviewing quarterly reports, the next he was on the floor and I was calling 911 while his assistant stood in the doorway crying.
He died before the ambulance arrived.
They told me it was quick, like that was supposed to be comforting—like it made up for the fact that he was gone and I had no idea what I was doing.
The board met two weeks after the funeral.
I sat at the head of the table in my father’s chair—which felt wrong, like I was playing dress-up in clothes that didn’t fit—and I listened to twelve men discuss whether I was capable of running the company he’d built from nothing.
My father had started Devlin Holdings thirty years ago with a single property in Queens. He’d worked construction during the day, studied business at night, saved every penny until he could afford to buy a building that everyone else thought was worthless. He’d renovated it himself, learned as he went, turned it into something profitable.
Then he’d done it again and again, building the company one property at a time, one smart decision at a time, until Devlin Holdings was a name that meant something in New York real estate.
And then cancer came.
It started in his lungs and spread fast. The doctors gave him two years and he lasted eighteen months, working until the very end even when he could barely stand up straight.
