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‘How much did he borrow?’ she asked, the guilt constricting around her tonsils.
‘A lot.’
‘Perhaps, if we got the theatre’s operating costs back into the black,’ she said, hopefully, ‘we could start paying off the loans?’
‘Doubtful,’ he said. ‘The bulk of the repayments – totalling close to two million pounds sterling – become due in three months.’
Two million pounds?
Shock reverberated through her. How on earth had Matty managed to borrow that much?
‘Perhaps we could find an investor,’ she said, hinting desperately. Like maybe a millionaire property magnate from Manhattan who now owns half the theatre.
They still had options, surely. If she could just get him to—
‘Maybe, but I’m out,’ he said, slicing through the last of her happy thoughts, right down to the bone.
‘What do you mean you’re out?’ she said, but she already knew, she could see it on his face.
‘I get that this place means a lot to you,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But if your lover figured I was going to bailout a failing business on his behalf, he got that wrong. My best advice is to sell.’ He let his eyes skim over the shabby room, while Ruby tried to stop herself from hyperventilating. ‘With the money you’ll make from the sale of the property you can pay off the debts, start a new business and still give all the people working downstairs a very generous severance package.’
Severance package? Sale? What the actual fuck?
The terrifying words pinged about in her head with the pinball, rattling her brains and her equilibrium. But only one word of his devastating speech hit the jackpot.
‘Matty wasn’t my—’ She stopped. Breathed. There were so many things she wanted to say in that moment – all the things she had loved about Matty, all the many things she was going to miss, even the things she hadn’t loved so much – but she’d need an Oscar-winning scriptwriter, a dose of Xanax and the wonderful wonderful Wizard of Oz’s gift of the gab to deliver it coherently. So she said the one thing that seemed the most important for him to know. ‘Matty was my boss, and my friend, and my soul mate and my kindred spirit … and I loved him to bits. But we were never lovers.’
‘If you say so,’ Devlin said, the cynical edge in his tone digging into her stomach.
Then the grief grew like a clump of nuclear waste, pushing out through her lungs, seeping from her pores, and the inky blackness exploded.
‘He was gay, you stupid—’ She cut off the expletive, the inky blackness flattened by a dark tide of sadness. ‘He was gay.’
But that wasn’t who Matty was. He was so much more than just his sexuality. And this man knew none of it. Not one thing about him. Even though they were blood relations and he now owned half of Matty’s dream. A dream he didn’t even want.
‘He meant everything to me,’ she murmured in the most reasonable and non-hysterical voice she could muster while her heart was shattering into tiny shards of agony. ‘And you didn’t even know him. So if you don’t mind, I’d really appreciate it if you would make an effort to at least fake regret while telling me you think I should destroy his legacy.’
***
Luke stared, the hairs on the back of his neck doing the mamba as he watched Dorothy – or rather, Ruby Graham – hang on to the flood of grief-stricken tears with a dignity he had not expected.
Next time perhaps try sugar-coating the bad news, you dumbass.
Another solitary tear escaped, melting the ball of rouge highlighting her cheekbone, before she swiped it away.
‘Hey.’ He held his palms up, in the universal sign of surrender.
Please don’t cry.
But to be fair she didn’t look like she was going to just cry, she looked a whole lot more devastated than that.
For the first time in a long time, it occurred to him he’d misjudged his approach. Then again, he hadn’t planned to come into the theatre all guns blazing. He knew how to close a deal, for chrissakes.
But having his father staring down at him from a poster the size of a Times Square billboard had only exacerbated the fallout from the unwanted blitz when he’d arrived. His palms had been clammy, his heartbeat struggling to slow down from warp speed, and his stomach had twisted itself into a giant pretzel in the lobby before the show.
The onset of physical reactions, which he thought he’d conquered years ago after a ton of therapy, had been a devastating reminder of the similar incidents he’d had to endure as a kid when his mom had happily paraded him about as Falcone’s Mini-Me.
He hadn’t had an anxiety attack since he was eighteen, not even close, because he hadn’t associated with people in the movie business for almost that long whom he wasn’t related to. And the construction business was not generally packed with people who gave a crap about some has-been movie actor who had killed himself sixteen years ago.
