Chapter Twenty-Four
Jack
At Hollyhock Farm, the rain came down harder. Any snow on the ground had turned to slush as Jack wacked nails into the wooden structure that would become a pay booth for the maze when it was up and running for the public.
‘Jack, get inside!’ Nate hollered. ‘Leave that till tomorrow, you’ve done enough!’
He didn’t look at his friend. After the showdown with Nicole and Kent at the office, he’d driven out to the farm and without explanation had started work. Nate had found him, hammer in hand, nails at the ready and hadn’t asked him anything, until now.
‘Jack, what the hell is going on?’ Nate cowered beneath the tiny pointed roof of the shed, trying to stay dry.
Jack didn’t care how wet he was getting, and without looking at Nate, he said, ‘Mom didn’t have anything wrong with her heart. She was murdered.’ He attacked the wood with another nail. ‘Oh, and by the way, it was Nicole’s son who murdered her.’
Put like that, he had the upper hand. His friend was too shocked to ask questions. Jack was too confused to answer any. They simply stood there, side by side, getting soaked through, a hammer each, banging in the rest of the nails to secure the front panel.
An hour later, Jack left the farm and returned to Manhattan. The only sounds filling the car were the slicing of dirt and slush on the roads as his wheels cut through them, and instead of going home he ventured to his father’s townhouse, the home his mother had lived in, the home she’d brought him to as a baby, the four walls where they’d harboured her killer’s mother for thirteen years.
There was a rare space to park out front and Jack left the car, plodded up the front steps, and before he could knock, the door opened. Kent stood behind it, no sign of the housekeeper, old or new.
‘You’re soaked.’ Kent waited for Jack to slip his shoes from his feet. ‘There are spare clothes upstairs in your old room. You must’ve left them here once before, some sweatpants, an old hoodie. You’ll find fresh towels in the linen cupboard. Take a shower, warm up, then we’ll meet down here and we’ll talk.’
For once, Jack did as he was told without challenge, without comeback. He took the stairs one at a time towards his old room, passing by the smaller room that had once been the nursery for Cameron, then for him, but now housed folders and paperwork to do with the business, the overspill from the office.
After he’d showered and pulled on the dry clothes, Jack returned downstairs and into the living room where his father was tending to the fire with a poker. He added one more log, and as the flames licked around it and he saw Jack, he said, ‘Scotch?’
‘Neat,’ Jack confirmed.
Kent took the lid from the crystal decanter and poured two measures, handing one glass to Jack. Whatever health measures his father was on, tonight they could be forgotten. Both of them needed this.
‘I’m trying to work this all out in my mind.’ Jack looked into the deep-golden liquid.
‘I know this has all come as a shock, but I didn’t intend to hire Nicole. I—’
‘No, not just with hiring Nicole, but ever since Mom died. What the hell has been going on with us?’
Neither of them spoke for a while.
‘Dad, I’ve been working my ass off in this business Mom started, the legacy she left, and you’ve been doing the same. But it feels as though we pull in different directions. You’re able to focus completely on work, see the bigger picture, but I’m not sure I ever could or ever will. I want out, Dad.’
Kent looked up at him, his hand stilled on his glass.
‘That’s right. It’s taken me years to say it, but today, the day of truths, I can’t wait any longer. I can’t wait for you to tell me why you brought a relative of my mother’s killer into our house. I don’t need to know right now why you lied to me and couldn’t trust me with the truth. All I want is to be free. I want my life, a life that I choose for myself.’
Kent knocked back his Scotch in one. ‘I had no idea you felt that way, son.’ The leather couch groaned when he sat down. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Because all these years, I’ve wanted to make you proud. I wanted to make Mom proud. And I know that sounds stupid when she isn’t here anymore, but she didn’t get to see me graduate high school, she wasn’t there to watch me go off to college, she’s never welcomed a girlfriend into her home, she won’t ever see the man I’ve become. And working my butt off in the business always made me feel as though I could hold onto the last pieces of her, that I hadn’t let her go.’
Kent’s hand scratched across the stubble on his chin. ‘What a mess I’ve made of everything.’
‘It’s not only your fault. I could’ve spoken up.’
‘I doubt I would’ve listened.’
Jack smiled ruefully.
‘Your mother had a real passion for jewellery making and I wanted to give her the world, so I turned her designs into reality. We built a multi-million dollar company on the back of that dream. But you know, a few weeks before she died, she’d had the flu and been cooped up in bed all day for over a week.’ He sat down next to his son. ‘I’d looked after her the best I could even though I’d been flying across the country to meet buyers, build the business even further. Anyway, one day after I’d returned from Seattle, I sat on the edge of her bed, insisting she sipped from a glass of water and keep her fluids up. She’d told me that lying there all week, she’d had a chance to think about the life we led. She said how thankful she was to be so lucky as to have me, to have you and Cameron, to never have to worry about where the next dollar was coming from.
‘But then she told me that being married to me was like being married to two different people. There was the husband who sat on the edge of her bed and looked after her, rubbed her head to soothe her, brought her a bowl of grapes because she was too sick to go downstairs for herself. He was the same husband who went to every one of their son’s soccer matches at school, their daughter’s swim meets, and sat through every parent-teacher meeting, nurturing his children to become fine grown-ups. The other man, she told me, was the man who strived to give her more than she would ever need. The man who wanted to make more money, throw lavish parties, to be a New York success story. She told me she was proud of what we’d achieved, but she was content if it never became more.
