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I hadn’t thought about Cameron recently, but now I remembered his grandparents had run Art’s Bakery. I was fairly sure our family hadn’t had a hold in the business back then. If we had, I hadn’t known about it. Lucien could tell me how recent our connection was, but I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. I couldn’t risk giving into the urge to tell him I hadn’t just tried to cheat off Cameron. He didn’t know I’d offered to pay for tutoring and been turned down. I sure as hell didn’t want pity from him, and spilling my guts like that always made me feel like shit afterwards, embarrassed and wary.
I contacted Emilio, an associate who was as good at hacking as I was at getting people to do exactly what I wanted. It didn’t take him long to learn some very interesting things about Cameron. He’d moved to some shit town in Indiana when he’d left Boston. He’d finished high school there and won a scholarship to fucking UC Davis. After he finished college with high honors, he went on to law school. He’d spent a few years at some pretentious-ass firm in San Francisco, but then he’d left to work at Legal Aid until three months ago when he’d quit.
Emilio couldn’t find anything to indicate Cameron had been employed or even applied for another job since then. That was interesting. Had Cameron burned out? Had he expected an offer that never came? That couldn’t be it. He was fucking brilliant. Anyone would want him. Maybe he’d been looking for a new start. Maybe he thought he had that now with the bakery. But the bakery wasn’t really his. The Marchesis fucking owned him.
As I stared at a recent picture of him—why the fuck was he more goddamn gorgeous than he’d been in high school?—I wondered if he’d changed or if he was just as self-righteous as he’d been back then. Based on his stuffy-looking shirt and jacket in the picture, he fucking was. Cameron was in trouble now, though. If he wanted to keep the bakery—and it didn’t look like he had a lot of other prospects—he was going to have to accept that it only existed because of his father’s willingness to clean up our filthy money, and he was going to have to keep right on working for us. I’d seen his bank balance, and he didn’t have half a million dollars—plus interest—to give me. It was going to take him a damn long time to work that off.
2
Cameron
The bakery was a fucking mess. Boxes were piled haphazardly in the kitchen, and the equipment was a disorganized jumble. It wasn’t as filthy as the apartment upstairs where my father had been living until he’d gotten himself killed, but I had no idea how someone was supposed to bake in here without losing their minds. The storeroom was worse. It was as if every time there was a delivery, boxes and crates had been shoved in there with no effort to unpack them onto the shelves.
My dad had probably been too drunk or high to care. I had no reason to believe he’d changed in his last years. He was found dead—the victim of a random mugging, the police said—in a part of town he had no business in, with a staggeringly high blood alcohol level.
I was shocked the bakery had remained open as long as it had, but I was thankful it was still here. My grandparents might come back to haunt the place if it was turned into anything other than a business where people from the neighborhood enjoyed gathering. Serving their neighbors had always been important to them.
The bakery had been closed since my father’s death, waiting for me to make a decision about reopening. I’d continued to pay Maria who’d been my father’s de facto manager. From what I could tell, she’d been essentially running the place for years, though I didn’t see how she’d done it. None of the books showed a profit, and from what Maria said, she’d often had to close early or not open at all because there weren’t enough supplies. Getting her pay out of my father had apparently been a constant fight, but the moment I contacted her, she pushed me to reopen.
What I hadn’t known, until I’d seen my father’s will, was that my grandparents owned the building the bakery and the apartment above it were in, not just the business itself. Property values in the North End had soared in recent decades. I could live on the profits of the sale for years. I could go back to school. I could do whatever I liked. I’d intended to find a buyer who wanted to use the location for a bakery or restaurant.
Then I’d come home.
