Her Friend Set The Poor Waitress Up On A Blind Date— Mins Later, The Mafia Boss Entered With His Dog

Chapter 4

There was one thing Dahlia didn’t know after eleven years. She didn’t know why Wren always refused Friday evening shifts. Dahlia thought it was the bus, or her mother, or one of the dozens of reasons Wren had given her, reasons Dahlia had never bothered to count. But it wasn’t. Wren refused Friday nights because Friday night was when the black car parked outside Ardith House, and she had spent two years arranging her entire life around never having to step out of the kitchen at that hour. She didn’t know the name of the person sitting inside the car. She only knew another name — a name she had read on the screen of a scanner in the darkness — and that name was Rory.

Nine days before that evening, Nathaniel Cross sat in a conference room on the fourteenth floor of a building he owned, listening as his attorney told him that the greatest problem in his life wasn’t the evidence. The attorney’s name was Prior, silver-haired, forty years in practice, with a habit of delivering unpleasant truths in the voice of a man reading the weather forecast.

“Merritt Nakamura has spent four years on you,” Prior said. “She isn’t stupid. She isn’t greedy. And she isn’t in a hurry. Those are the three worst qualities a federal prosecutor can have.” Nathaniel said nothing. He’d read the file. He knew what Nakamura had, and what she didn’t, and the distance between those two things was wide enough to let him sleep at night, if he still slept.

“That isn’t what worries me,” Prior said. “What worries me is that if this goes to trial, twelve citizens of Rhode Island will sit inside a wooden box and look at you for six weeks. And what will they see? A thirty-seven-year-old man, ninety million dollars, no wife, no children, living alone in a building no one has ever entered. Not one person who can take the stand and say they’ve had dinner in your home.” Prior closed the file. “You don’t need a better story, Nathaniel. You need a life that looks like a life. Juries don’t convict on evidence. They convict on feeling. And right now, the feeling people get from you is a locked safe.”

Three days later, Walter Keane told him the same thing in different words. Walter was sixty-two years old and had sat at Nathaniel’s father’s right hand since before Nathaniel had learned to walk. He spoke like a man who had never needed to raise his voice to be heard. They were in the kitchen of Walter’s house one morning while he poured coffee.

“Prior is right,” Walter said, “but he’s saying it the wrong way. This isn’t about putting on a performance for a jury. This is about people needing to see you living like an ordinary human being. And it needs to begin today, not on the day you’re indicted. Because anything that starts after an indictment looks like an act.” He set a cup of coffee in front of Nathaniel. “Have dinner somewhere in public. Not at an event, not at a fundraiser. One table, one woman, someone who doesn’t know who you are and has no reason to pretend.”

Nathaniel said he didn’t have time for that. Walter said he knew, then continued, “Ardith House, Friday. You’ve been going there for two years. No one will think it’s strange when you appear, and that’s exactly what matters. A man who changes his habits gets noticed. A man who keeps his habits and adds one chair doesn’t.” He even knew someone who could arrange it — an event manager who worked there, the younger sister of a man he’d once done business with, the kind of person who talked too much and never said anything important.

Nathaniel remembered thinking Walter had never given bad advice in his life, and that was why he was still alive at sixty-two in a profession where most people didn’t live to see forty. He agreed. He agreed because Prior was right, and Walter was right, and because he was tired of being right alone.

But neither of those reasons was the real one. The real reason was an afternoon eleven days earlier, at a twenty-four-hour animal clinic on the east side of the city, when a woman in blue scrubs had looked at the dog’s weight chart and told him it had lost twenty-four pounds in two years, and there was nothing in its bloodwork that could explain why. She’d run every test. She’d run them again. Then she closed the chart and said the words Nathaniel had carried with him ever since.

“He isn’t sick, Mr. Cross. He’s waiting. Dogs don’t understand the idea of someone not coming back. They only understand not yet. And he’s been living inside that not yet for two years.”

Nathaniel had asked what he was supposed to do. She said there was nothing he could do. Sometimes they stopped on their own, and sometimes they didn’t. From that day forward, Nathaniel took the dog everywhere — into conference rooms, into the car, into rooms where no one dared ask why a hundred-and-fifty-pound animal was lying beneath the table. He didn’t do it because he believed it would help. He did it because every time he walked out the door without the dog, he pictured it lying on the marble floor of the hallway, face turned toward the entrance, waiting, and he couldn’t bear the thought of a living creature in that building waiting for someone who would never walk through that door again.

So when Walter said dinner, Nathaniel thought of a table and chairs and a long evening spent sitting still in one place. He didn’t think about the woman at all. He only thought that the dog would be allowed to come with him.