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“What?” I demand.
“She hit your button,” he says. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Henry.”
I watch him warily, bright brown eyes and skin like leather.
“Your mother was a crazy bitch. She dedicated her life to smashing every sand castle you managed to build. My picture of your childhood is you sitting on the front stoop of your mansion, clutching that bear of yours, crying your eyes out because she’d left. Yet again. Bernadette was a narcissistic gold digger who blamed you for everything. And your father didn’t do shit to correct that.”
“Don’t,” I say. “That’s enough.” He’d always kept opinions like that to himself.
“Yet you always wanted her love. You’d follow her around. Remember how she always called you Pokey?”
Pokey. Her nickname for me. “I never could keep up with her.”
“Of course you couldn’t. You were a child.”
I shrug. “I’m glad for how she was. She taught me to be strong, to rely on myself.”
“You’ve never been a liar, Henry. Don’t start now.”
I turn to him. It’s been a while since Renaldo lowered the boom. “What?”
“Please.” He mimics my shrug. “Like you don’t care. You loved her and she broke your heart. These last few years, I know the Christmas gifts you’d send her would come back unopened. The cards returned, the calls unanswered. You never stopped trying to be a good son to her. You didn’t want to be made strong. You wanted a relationship.”
I frown.
He gives me a long look. “I watched you build this company, even with Kaleb blocking your best ideas. You sweat blood for this company. These people. Then your mother comes along and gives a strange woman absolute power over it. A woman who has zero reasons to care about it.”
Who seems to actively hate rich guys, I think, but I don’t say it. “Vicky’s starting to care about it. She’s starting to get what we’re doing.”
“Not the point.” Renaldo crosses his legs, face grim. “She makes a joke about repainting the cranes in some ridiculous image? That’s what your mother would do. Except she’d actually do it. You believed the worst because how else could it be?”
“I acted like she was my mother.”
“Your button,” he says.
“I need to apologize. I need to tell her…” Something. Everything.
“Do it, then.”
“She won’t see me. She won’t answer my calls and texts.”
“Think of something. You’re Henry fucking Locke, for crissake.”
That’s how I end up in the waterfront workshop at three in the morning. I’m up in the third-floor model room. My tuxedo jacket is slung over a drafting table. I have an extra-large coffee at hand, but I barely need it.
I’m awake. Sobered up. Somebody was messing with my world, but it wasn’t Vicky.
She won’t answer my calls, but I can still talk to her—in a language she understands better than English. I work into the night and all through the morning.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Vicky
I sip coffee at our little table, trying to be quiet and not wake Carly, who’s sleeping in her little curtained-off area with Smuckers.
“It never would’ve lasted anyway,” I whisper.
Across the room, Buddy the parrot jerks his head, watches me with a shiny black eye.
