Page 229 of Boardroom Sins

He never deleted her.

He looks at them, at his son’s name glowing on the screen and his dead wife’s name right beneath it. A pair of ghosts he’s been carrying for too long.

Then he lowers the phone and looks at me. “I’m going to go find him. Will you wait for me?”

I take his hand, the one that dug a grave and crushed pills and held a dying woman and, against all odds, learned to hold me, too.

“Yes,” I say simply. “I’ve got you.”

LUKAS

CITY OF NEW YORK — DEPT. OF BUILDINGS

SITE NOTICE:CEASE WORK ORDER

Location:Astoria Luxury Residences, Lot 14-C

Status: ACTIVE CRIME SCENE — All construction halted

The construction site in Astoria is cordoned off with police tape that snaps and flutters in the winter wind. Red plastic barriers ring the excavation pit where they found Elena’s remains. The ground is still torn up and tire tracks from forensic vehicles have churned the perimeter into icy mud.

I park on the street and kill the engine.

I don’t get out right away, though. For a moment, I just sit here, hands on the wheel, engine ticking as it cools. Staring at the place where I buried my wife eighteen years ago.

It doesn’t look the same as it did last time I was here. Half-built luxury condos rise up on either side. Jutting, exposed rebar, acres of glass, steel piling. It’s gentrification unfoldingbefore my eyes, though the discovery of human remains has, understandably, stalled construction for a while.

A weathered sign near the gate readsRIVERVIEW RESIDENCES — LUXURY LIVING COMING SOON. Someone has spray-paintedMURDERERacross it in red.

I don’t flinch at that. I’ve been called worse by better.

But I know this ground. Beneath the construction equipment and the police tape and the mud, Iknowit. I dug into it with my bare hands while my back bled through my shirt and Elena grew cold in her blanket. I know every last inch of this cursed earth.

The wind picks up. A sail of plastic sheeting billows and cracks against a concrete pillar. Rats and dogs in the alley bark and squeak and scamper around.

With a sigh, I open the car door.

The cold hits me hard. December in Queens is its own kind of freezing, a violent, wet chill that crawls inside your skin and sets up camp in your bone marrow. I pull my collar up and stride toward the pit.

There’s no fence anymore. The police cut through the original one during the excavation and replaced it with a temporary barrier that’s already sagging on its posts. I step over it without breaking stride.

My shoes sink into the cold muck, and the sound it makes, that slurping, sucking crunch, sends me hurtling backward through time so violently that I have to stop walking and press my hand against a concrete pillar just to stay upright.

That sound.The shovel biting into frost-hardened ground. The grunt of effort. The hot, sick trickle of blood down my spine where the extraction sites had torn open.

I breathe.In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

When I’m ready, I move again.

The excavation pit opens up before me, ten feet of sheared sides going straight down towards hell. The walls are crude where backhoes and forensic tools have chewed through layers of soil, exposing cross-sections of clay and gravel and tree roots severed clean.

And there, sitting on the edge with his legs dangling into the hole, right where I was so certain I’d find him, is Kir.

He’s shed his suit jacket. His white shirt is dirty, streaked with grime and God knows what else, the sleeves shoved past his elbows, the tail untucked and hanging limp. His dark hair stands up in wild tufts. Even from twenty feet away, I can see how his shoulders shake.

He’s not crying. Kir learned a long time ago not to cry where his father might see. That’s a lesson I taught him, whether I meant to or not. One of a thousand unintentional cruelties I’ve committed against my own blood.