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I cast my eyes downward as I take a breath to quiet my nerves. "It's about Brooke."
He stops chewing and stares at me. "What about her?" he asks out of the corner of his mouth.
I watch him pick the plate up and reach past me to place it next to the water. He scoots closer to me.
"Why did you make that recording?" It's a neutral place for me to start. I want to understand his true motivations for filming Brooke and for coercing her into playing that voicemail that Mark left her.
"She was out of control." His eyes idly scan the room. "She came to me weeks before that and tried to seduce me."
"Really?" I ask although I'm not surprised. It was the first assumption I'd made after viewing the entire file on the flash drive.
He nods. "She played that voicemail for me to prove that I could trust her," he says as he locks his eyes on my face. "I'm sorry you had to hear that."
"It wasn't shocking." I mean the words. "Mark was very good at hiding his true self."
He reaches for my hand and strokes it with his. "I wanted her to back off. Not from Mark. I didn't care about him at that point. I just wanted her away from the company."
"Because of what she did to your dad?"
His expression shifts slightly to one of concern. "She really fucked up his life. My mother's too. I couldn't watch her ruin the company and it felt like she was going to do that."
"Was she delusional?" I ask because I want to understand what she was really after.
"My father promised her the moon and the stars and half of the company." He waves his hand in the air as if motioning to the sky beyond the ceiling.
"During their affair," I mumble.
"She gave him something. Attention maybe, a sense of love. I don't know what but he needed it and he was willing to give her anything in return."
I lean forward. "Do you think that was just pillow talk?"
He looks into my eyes. I see sadness there now. I know it's difficult for him to talk about his father's weaknesses. "He was never going to give her anything once he found out she was sleeping with Mark too. He told me that when he was dying."
"What did she want from you? Did she really believe you'd be on board to blackmail Mark?"
"Maybe?" he says it without conviction. "Before my dad died she bought an apartment she couldn't afford. He paid her mortgage and when he was gone, that evaporated so she panicked."
"And the recording?" I leave the question open ended on purpose.
"The recording was meant to push her into just disappearing. I thought if I threatened her with it, she'd bolt before Mark saw it. It wasn't the best laid plan but I wanted to corner her. Make her feel the same pressure she made my dad feel."
"Did you ever play it for Mark?"
"I didn't have to." He reaches past me to grab the bottle of water. "My mom took a turn for the worse so I left for California. Once she died I came back and Brooke was gone."
"Did you wonder what happened to her?" I push the subject wanting to know if he has any inkling that Mark paid her off.
"I've always secretly hoped she fell into the Hudson River on one of her morning jogs." He laughs the comment away.
I smile meekly. The idea of that woman falling into the river conjures up images of men with cement shoes in hand and thick Jersey accents who are getting paid in unmarked bills.
"My guess is that she nailed some executive to the w
all and he married her."
"Is that an uneducated guess?" I'm wondering exactly what did happen to her now.
"Not entirely," he says. "I heard a woman from payroll talk about Brooke's husband in the lunchroom one day when I stopped to get a coffee."
