AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He probably would, too. Since arriving in New York, he’d spent far too many nights in front of the television eating takeout. He’d discovered a lot of interesting movies and programs this way. It was his tendency to speak of them in conversation with Beatrice that had convinced her he needed to get out more.
He had no objection to the idea. It was simply that outside of work hours, he hadn’t been able to figure out what it was he was supposed to be doing, or where, or with whom.
Four years ago he’d made sense: Winston Chamberlain, heir to a baronetcy and head of the Chamberlain financial empire, married fourteen years to Rosemary, father to adolescent Beatrice, owner of a handsome country estate and a luxury flat in the city.
A brother, a son, a reasonable and responsible man who had everything under control.
There were days he’d hated his life. Nights he’d laid awake wondering if he’d fucked the whole thing up irreparably. But he’d done nothing about it—had chosen, instead, to sink deeper into his role.
Winston hadn’t understood that pain could live quietly in a room inside someone, locked down and fed by routines, by rigidity, by tight control. He didn’t understand until it got out, and he behaved like an animal, attacking the brother he loved.
It had been the last straw with his wife. They’d limped along a few more years, but finally she’d sued him for divorce.
Rosemary had declared it his turn to parent and left him with a seventeen-year-old daughter who adamantly insisted she would attend New York University and nowhere else. He’d had to sell the house. His mother had told him bluntly he was no use at the office since the divorce, so he might as well follow Bea to Manhattan, where he could sort things out at a firm they’d recently acquired and learn how to be a proper father to his daughter.
One thing had led to the next, and on to the next, and it wasn’t that Winston wanted to go back. But his brother had fallen in love, left the bank, and become a painter. Last he’d heard, Rosemary was headed to the Himalayas on a climbing expedition. His daughter—who just a few brief years ago had been wearing a school uniform and performing in equestrian exhibitions—had transformed herself into a student, a barista, and a budding filmmaker.
All of them happy. All of them full of passionate pronouncements about how they’d finally figured out how to live their lives.
All he’d figured out was how to work Netflix.
Allie’s gaze flicked from his face to the mirror to the pinball table, then back to him again. Slumped against the wall as she was, it was hard to believe she was the same woman who’d yanked him close and put her mouth near his just moments ago. Her bravado had abandoned her.
It was his curse to want to see it restored.
“Shall I get us drinks, then?”
“Yeah. A rum and Coke? And maybe see what intel you can gather.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Winston ordered from a young bartender with a bushy beard and razor-trimmed hair. Casually, he extracted a credit card from his pocket and set it on the countertop, waiting a few beats before he glanced at the couple Allie was so interested in.
The woman was doing most of the talking, her voice loud enough to hear over the music, her hands waving. She wore blue jeans and a patterned top, her body rounded and softened with middle age, her hair a cloud of frizzy light brown curls. She looked like any woman he might pass on the street, but when she smiled, he noticed her eyes—bright, clear blue, full of light.
Her voice rose, the story reaching its conclusion, and the man laughed.
Winston froze.
When she climbed back onto her barstool, she opened up a clear line of sight between Winston and her companion, and that cinched it.
Christ. The woman was here with Justice.
The bartender set the drinks in front of him. “Do you want to pay for these now or start a tab?”
Winston cleared his throat. “I’ll start a tab.” He’d only intended to nip into the bar for a drink while the storm eased up, but seeing Justice changed everything. It seemed likely he’d be sticking around awhile.
He sipped the whiskey the waiter had brought him, thinking.
It was no great surprise, in fact, to find the artist here. Justice had been the one to introduce him to this Greenwich Village bar when he first arrived in New York, insisting Winston meet him here for a drink because he refused to set foot in the financial district.
Justice demanded special treatment, and he usually got it. He was by no means the wealthiest client whose portfolio Winston had managed, but he was one of the oddest: a public installation artist with an international profile who hid his identity behind
a pseudonym and cloaked his life in mystery.
His real name was a closely guarded secret.
In the art world, Justice was known for being unknown and unknowable—a hermit, a recluse, a cipher.
