That was a lot, coming from her. It had probably been hard for her to say. I nodded, she turned to walk off, and I remembered something she should know. So I chased after her, calling her name. She turned around, and the breeze blew her dark hair across her face.
“Don’t trust Fabian Spader,” I blurted out. “He acts like he’s on your family’s side, but he isn’t. He tried to manipulate me into giving him information to trash y’all in the press.”
Virginia cocked an eyebrow and stared at me. “That can’t be. Fabian’s very loyal.”
The air was getting cooler; I wrapped my arms around myself as we stood beside a traffic light on a corner where people were waiting to cross. I stared back at Virginia, thinking she might dash away in her designer heels when the light changed, but she didn’t.
“No,” I said. “He’s only pretending to be.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said finally, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Then she was gone and I went back to the curb, where Tony pulled up in the sedan. I opened the front door and stuck my head into the passenger’s side.
“I knew you’d be back,” he said with a laugh.
“How?” I asked.
A wide smile spread across his boyish face. “That’s just the kind of girl you are.”
Twenty-five
It was Halloween, and gray clouds loomed over the Manhattan skyline. I saw them through a window when I walked into Kitty’s office at five on a Friday, asking if she needed anything else before I left. She leaned back in her chair, locking her fingers behind her head and giving me a smile.
“You’ve been doing so well since you came back from Charleston,” she said.
I’d been trying. I hadn’t taken long lunches or online-shopped at the office, and there were no romantic interests to distract me from my work. There also hadn’t been any attempted humiliation or sabotage. Since that day at the spa, Caroline and I hadn’t gone to dinner together or even shared a coffee break. But we’d been cordial, which was what I’d asked for when we first met. And Ned hadn’t been troublesome, either. He kept his distance up there in the stuffy corporate division, probably so he could avoid both Kitty and me—and that was fine, too.
“Do you have plans tonight?” Kitty asked.
My social calendar had been sparse since my return, but Mom and Tina tried to keep me from feeling alone. I’d bought webcams for me and for them, and not a day went by when I didn’t see and speak to one or the other. I’d also bought them plane tickets to come here for Christmas, and counting down the days helped. But most of the time, I felt alone.
“Maybe I’ll do some writing,” I said, thinking of my story in the October issue of Femme that I’d framed and hung on the wall in my home office. “I’m outlining a novel … and I have an idea for a new short story. I might try to convince a certain editor that it’s worth publishing.”
“I doubt it’ll take much convincing,” she said as I glanced at a business card on her desk, which was for an adoption agency on East 92nd. I thought it might be a leftover from her marriage, so I quickly shifted my gaze, but I wasn’t fast enough. She caught my eye, picked up the card, and tacked it to a corkboard on the wall. “I can be a mother on my own,” she said with a serene smile, “if I want to be. But even if I decide not to, that’ll be okay, too. I’m taking all steps toward my future slowly … I think there are a lot of options out there for me.”
I nodded, smiling back. “I think so, too, Kitty.”
Her e-mail beeped. She clicked on a message, read it, and twisted the monitor around for me to see. The e-mail was from Caroline, and it said the NYPD had made a final determination about who had hit Edward’s car: It was Halstead Simms, it was an accident, and the toxicology reports showed that Simms’s death had resulted from alcohol poisoning. We’ll see, Caroline had written at the end. Ned just called our PI.
“Senator Caldwell and her husband are still being investigated,” Kitty said. “I’m sure they both knew Amicus was indirectly killing people. But … do you think Edward did?”
I’d thought a lot about that, and I still hadn’t come up with an answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I like to believe he didn’t.”
*
I left the Stone News building and headed for the black sedan. But before I could reach it, the front door swung open and Marjorie rushed out, dressed in a bumble bee costume with antennae and wings. She jumped into my arms and I carried her back to the car, reaching into my purse to pull out a bag of candy I’d bought during lunch. “I was going to have your daddy give this to you … but since you’re here, I’ll do it myself.”
She thanked me and gave me a hug, pressing her soft cheek into my neck. I smiled, brought her into the backseat with me, and slammed the door.
Tony turned around. “I thought you weren’t going to sit in the back anymore.”
“I will when I’m with her. I like her better than you,” I said, giving him a wink.
He laughed, pulled into traffic, and not long after that we were at 15 Central Park West, where Marjorie gave me a good-bye hug and Tony turned around again.
“See you on Monday?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said.
Marjorie waved at me through a half-open window when I was on the sidewalk and Tony was driving away. When they were gone, I stayed where I was, watching a small group of kids in costumes holding trick-or treat bags as their parents escorted them into buildings. It was getting dark and the cold air smelled of leaves burning somewhere—maybe upstate. Tony had told me that a scent could travel all the way down the Hudson River.
“Happy Halloween, Savannah.”
I glanced to my right, startled. Alex was standing there, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket with a black turtleneck underneath. I didn’t smell leaves anymore—the air had filled with something fresh and minty. And I couldn’t say anything. I just stared like he was a ghost.
His blue eyes moved between me and the sidewalk, which was littered with squashed candy corn and crinkled gum wrappers. “You look different.”
I was so surprised to see him that it took me a moment to figure out what he meant. My hand rose to my head and my sunflower-blond locks. “I suppose I do.”
He nodded. “I didn’t think you could be more beautiful … but I was wrong.”
You’re beautiful, too, I almost said, but only, “Thank you,” came out.
He raked his fingers through his dark hair, staying a few steps away. “Remember my story you edited during the summer? The one that had been rejected, I mean.”
I didn’t need clarification. Did he really think I could have forgotten the summer?
“Sure,” I said.
“It was accepted by a literary journal. It’ll be out in December.”
I felt as excited for him as when I’d achieved authordom myself. “That’s fantastic, Alex. I’m so happy for you.”
“You had a lot to do with it. That story would’ve stayed buried inside my laptop if you hadn’t worked your magic on it,” he said, jamming his hands in his pockets. “I’m happy for you, too, by the way. I saw your story when it was published … I’m generally not a reader of women’s magazines, but I bought a copy when it came out.”
I imagined him wearing a disguise as he covertly picked up the October Femme from a newsstand in a neighborhood far from his own. I nearly laughed, but it was more touching than funny. “You did?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said in his deep, smooth voice. “You should be proud of yourself.”
I shrugged, remembering all the help he’d given me on that warm night in his cramped apartment. “I couldn’t have done it without you, though.”
“Well,” he said after a moment, “I guess we were a good team.”
I nodded, kicking a candy corn toward the sewer.
“Savannah,” he said. “Tony told me you went to South Carolina, and he told me when you came back. I should’ve come by here sooner … I’ve been thinking about
it for weeks … but I wasn’t sure if you’d want to see me.”
I stepped on another piece of candy, grinding it beneath my shoe. “Then that’s the second thing you were wrong about,” I said, staring at yellow dust on the ground. “I’ve spent lots of time thinking about going to see you, too, but I haven’t … for the same reason.”
I looked up; there was stunned hope in his eyes. “I also know,” he said, “Tony filled you in about Mike. But he shouldn’t have had to. I shouldn’t have kept it from you.”
I shook my head. “It’s not your fault. At first I thought it was, but I’ve changed my mind. We hadn’t known each other for long … maybe I was expecting too much.”
He took his hands out of his pockets. “You weren’t. You told me so much about yourself … about your father … and you deserved to know more about me. But I thought you wouldn’t want me if you did,” he said as sadness crossed his face. He absorbed it like the fighter he was and squared his shoulders.
I couldn’t let him accept that pain and endure it forever like an incurable ache. I took a step toward him and squeezed his arm through his jacket. “Don’t blame yourself for what happened to Mike. It was an accident. Now get that through your thick skull and don’t you dare ever think otherwise, okay?”
His mouth tightened and his jaw clenched, but after a moment he gave me a slight nod. Then he wiped his hand down his face like he was washing something off. “You know,” he said, shifting his eyes to the glowing streetlights and the traffic passing by, “this city is filled with people … but so few of them matter to me. And I matter to so few of them.”
I nodded, remembering a dinner we’d eaten at a Chinese restaurant and a fortune I’d slipped out of a cookie: To the world you might be just one person, but to one person you might be the world. It was still inside my wallet, and I was sure it was exactly what Alex meant.
“I’ve missed you,” he said, his eyes on the gum wrappers at his feet.
I felt the way I did whenever I lost something and thought I’d never find it again, and then out of nowhere there it was—at the bottom of a drawer or zipped into a secret pocket inside a purse I hadn’t used in months—and even though I’d gotten along without it, everything seemed so much brighter now that it was back again.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I said.
He stopped staring at the sidewalk and looked at me. “I’m sorry for everything.”
I nodded again. “So am I.”
His lips parted into a small, cautious smile. “Does that mean we can…”
It was getting colder; I reached toward the top buttons on my coat and closed them. “Yeah,” I said, “we can give it another try … providing there are no foolish hard feelings about how much money is in my bank account. I can’t help that, and I won’t apologize for it, and you can’t hold it against me if I want to share some of what I have with you.”
I supposed I sounded as bossy as I had when I was dealing with delinquent teenagers at the library in Charleston, but everything I’d said was what he needed to hear. We couldn’t move forward unless we fixed what had broken.
He laughed as if my schoolmarm tone amused him. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, mixing southern manners with his Staten Island accent. “No more hard feelings. You were right when you said I had a chip on my shoulder … but I’ll do my best to take it off.”
I crossed my arms. “You certainly will, sir. And you were right when you said I was spoiled. At least, I was becoming that way … but I think I’ve put a stop to it.”
“Well,” he said, coming closer. “Since that’s settled … what should we do now?”
Butterflies whirled in my stomach like they had the night we met. I glanced around at the kids on the sidewalk and the pumpkins at the buildings’ entrances and the blinking orange lights that framed a window across the street, and all I wanted was to stay outside with Alex and the October air.
“We can start by going for a walk,” I said, holding out my hand.
He laced his fingers into mine and smiled when I looked into his face. We started walking and I wasn’t sure where we were going, but it felt like we were headed in the right direction. As we strolled under streetlights and past doormen in uniform, I remembered once thinking that Manhattan seemed like the loneliest place on earth. But right now, it didn’t feel that way at all.
ALSO BY LORRAINE ZAGO ROSENTHAL
Other Words for Love
About the Author
Lorraine Zago Rosenthal was born and raised in New York City. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in education from the University of South Florida. She also earned a master’s degree in English, with a concentration in American and British literature, from Northern Kentucky University. Her debut novel, Other Words for Love, was published in 2011.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
NEW MONEY. Copyright © 2013 by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunneooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Danielle Fiorella
Cover photographs: city © olly/Shuttershock.com; woman © Quintanilla/Shuttershock.com; hair © olly/Shuttershock.com; dress © Andrey_Popov/Shuttershock.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Rosenthal, Lorraine Zago.
New money: a novel / Lorraine Zago Rosenthal. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-02535-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-25002534-0 (e-book)
1. Upper class—Fiction. 2. Wealth—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.O8423N49 2013
813’.6—dc23
2013013484
e-ISBN 9781250025340
First Edition: September 2013
New Money Page 31
