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“Somewhere neither of you are,” Mal said and let the door bang on her way out.
There was a moment’s silence, and then Mom snapped, “That was your fault,” and she quit the living room, leaving Lenny five types of angry she didn’t have names for. She was over being the adult today.
She made up a plate of mac and cheese, ate, cleaned the kitchen, and then lay on her bed fully dressed, because she was worried about Mal.
She did not know how to be a better daughter, a better sister, or how to steer her family into calmer weather. Mom was so deeply in denial and reality challenged that a weekly grocery shopping trip was too much for her.
Mal’s over-the-top bitch routine was a desperate cry for help or worse, maybe worse. Oh please, don’t let it be worse.
And Easton habitually helicoptered in, painted himself as Mr. Fix It, and made Lenny the bad guy.
Always, she was the bad guy. Halsey was as right about that as he was about how freeing it felt to smash that glass.
At 10:00 p.m., she sent Mal a message.
Please be home in the next hour.
At midnight, unable to sleep, she called and got pushed to voicemail. “Mal, come home. We talked about you staying out on a school night.” Lenny had given up on trying to get her to come home at a reasonable hour on the weekend. It wasn’t only her chocolate and cheese diet making her feel sick. “Please come home.”
Hoping for a response, she stared at her bedroom ceiling. Every day she was thankful for having inherited this apartment from her grandmother, because without an actual home, things would be dramatically worse.
She dozed on her bed in her clothes with her phone ringer turned up to make sure she’d wake if Mal called. She dreamed Halsey Sherwood had given her wilted flowers and chocolates that tasted like chalk, broke her heart, and stole her money.
Mallory never called.
And Lenny overslept. She stumbled out of her bedroom to find Mal’s bed still made, but her clothes from last night in a jumble on the floor and her laptop bag gone. She’d been home, changed, and hopefully headed off to school.
It wasn’t flowers and chocolates, but it was better than a cracked heart.
Chapter Five
Halsey tapped the envelope he’d taken from Lenny’s office on the top of his desk. The concern he’d felt when scanning her accounts had morphed into outrage in the shape of a one hu
ndred thousand-dollar 1970 forest green Mercedes-Benz 280SL Coupe Roadster after he followed the money trail.
It was a gorgeous car, all original with only ten thousand miles on the clock. He coveted the car. He despised who now owned it, and the fact that D4D’s money had purchased it instead of a scholarship program.
That was a criminal act. And there was no way he could let it stand.
Given he came from generations of professional grifters, hustlers, fraudsters, and scammers, he knew how to spot corruption at one decimal point. What he’d spotted was inequality, greed, and exploitation, and it outraged him.
At heart, a Sherwood was a wealth redistributor whose role in life was to take money from entitled, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, vindictive, racist, sexist, homophobic, tax-dodging billionaires and give it to those who could better use it for the good of all.
What he was looking at here was the polar opposite. An entitled, self-aggrandizing, tax-dodging billionaire dictator named Aleksandrs Ozols, a.k.a. Sonny Ozols, or as his detractors referred to him—Cookie Jar—had stolen Lenny’s charity’s money and bought himself a car.
All Halsey had left to do was open the envelope. It was the final piece of information he needed. He’d been through D4D’s accounts, made a few subtle adjustments, flagged the problem donation to the United Heroes League, and now he had to decide whether to open the envelope like a normal person who knew how to use a French Art Nouveau sterling silver letter opener or steam it open like your average con artist who intended to use what was inside as leverage.
He was so aggrieved on Lenny’s behalf, what he really wanted to do was hit it with a flame thrower.
He picked up the slim letter opener and rubbed his thumb over the nude figure of a woman stretched out on her back. The letter could be an invitation, an entreaty to get Lenny to donate more with flattery, wining and dining thrown in to soften the ask, or it could simply be a thank you for the donation already made.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter what was inside; it was toxic to Lenny. There was no need to smuggle it back to her office or to involve her in his outrage-fueled revenge fantasy. Oh, there would be revenge and it would need to be fantastic, but it would be best for everyone concerned if Lenny never knew about it.
He put the point of the letter opener into the corner of the triangular flap.
She thought the Sherwood family were cheats and liars. Cookie Jar made them look like miracle-bestowing saints.
But really, his priority was warning Lenny off any further contact with the United Heroes League. He put the letter and the opener aside, turned to his keyboard, and tapped out an email. A casual greeting, keeping it easy, a paragraph on her accounts and an instruction to avoid all association with the United Heroes League.
