I went and ran a bath. I soaked in the lavender oil for 40 minutes. When I got out and dried off and dressed carefully, deliberately the way you dress when you’re about to enter a room that matters and went back to the monitor, he was still there. He’d sat down against the gate at some point, back against the iron, knees up, face turned toward the gray sky. He looked like something the city had put down and forgotten to pick up.
I called Mr. Kimble on the intercom. “Open the gate, show him to the groundskeeper’s cottage, tell him I’ll meet him there.”
The cottage sat 50 yards from the main house. A plain square room, workt, two folding chairs, and overhead bulb. Nothing else. I was already seated when Prescott came in. He stopped in the doorway. He took in the room, then me. I was wearing a deep green wool dress and my mother’s pearl earrings, and I looked, I knew, nothing like the woman he had last seen on the discharge sidewalk outside Bighgamin Women’s. That woman had been pale and hunched against the cold bow pressed against her chest, coins in her palm.
He crossed the room and sat down heavily. His hands went flat on the table. For a moment, he just breathed.
“Adelene,” he said. “My restaurants, all three of them, the credit line, the leases, the distributor, all of it happened at the same time. Within 48 hours, my investors pulled out simultaneously. The bank is threatening receiverhip. My lawyers have talked to your lawyers and gotten nothing. I don’t understand what happened.” His voice was cracking at the edges. “I need you to come home. If your family knows anyone, anyone with any connection to Voss Capital or to Beacon Development or to the building management company that controls the South End space—”
“I want to tell you something,” I said.
He’s stopped.
“When you left me at that discharge entrance 6 days after our son was born,” I said, “I watched my car drive away and I made a phone call.”
Something moved across his face, not understanding yet, just the shape of it approaching. “To who?”
“to my father.”
“Your dad is—”
“No,” I said he isn’t. I looked at him steadily. “His name is August Voss. He founded Voss Capital Group. They’re the anchor investor in the Beacon Community Development Fund, the one your expansion financing went through. They hold a controlling interest in the property management company that owns your South End building. They have a significant stake in your primary food distributor.”
The color left Prescott’s face. The way color leaves things. Not all at once, but in sections like something draining.
“Your restaurants didn’t fail because of bad luck,” I said. “They didn’t fail because of a difficult year or a supply problem or a market shift. They failed because my father made three phone calls on a Tuesday afternoon after I called him from a subway seat with our 6-day old son in my arms. Three phone calls. That’s all it took.”