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“He was conservative. He was frightened about taking as big a step as you wanted. He wasn’t sophisticated like you are. He didn’t have the vision, and when you tried to give it to him, he couldn’t see it. That was his limitation, John, not yours. In so many ways, you’re so much more than Eugene ever was—” She caught herself, stared at him, shook her head. “Do you hear me?” she asked in astonishment. “I’m defending you still.” The knot tightened in her throat. “I guess I’ll always do that. Just like you’ll always feel second best. It’s so much a part of you that you can’t give it up. You’ve lived so long with jealousy and hatred that you’d feel empty without it.”

She felt the first prick of tears in her eyes. She tried to will them away but she failed. “They’re the evil things, John, the jealousy and hatred. Not you. You’re not an inherently evil person, but you’ve let yourself be taken over. You’ve let yourself be emotionally stunted. And it’s made you miss out on so much.”

John stood with his legs apart and his features tight. “I’m not missing out on a thing. I have everything I want in life.”

“You do not. It’s sad.”

His eyes flashed. “There’s nothing sad about me. I have more than most people ever hope for.”

“You have nothing! You go to work. You come home, change your clothes, go out and come home again, and through it all you’re alone.”

“Look who’s talking. Are you any better? You’re not involved with anyone. You never have been. You work, go out, come home, and you’re alone. So who are you to criticize me?”

“But I don’t want to be alone! I never have, and I freely admit it!”

“So why do you do it?”

“Because I’ve been loving you all these years, waiting for you to love me back, only you can’t! You can’t love anyone! You’re too busy loving yourself, because you think that if you don’t, no one else will and you’ll have to go without. That’s the sad part.” Tears gathered on her lids, and her voice shrank. “But I can’t go on like this, John. I want more. I want someone to love me. I’m too old to have children. I blew that on you, too—not that you’d want children, because you’d see them as competition for your wife’s affections—and it may be that I’m too old to find someone to love me the way I want. But I can’t go on waiting for you this way, wondering when you’re going to come, holding my breath and praying.” In a splintered voice, she said, “It hurts too much. Loving you is too painful.”

His face blurred. She tossed a limp hand in the air and whispered, “I’m done with it.” Feeling drained and defeated, she turned and left.

John didn’t follow her. She wandered aimlessly through downtown Boston for a while before taking a cab to Logan and returning to New York. Rather than go straight to her apartment, she walked some, even stopped for dinner, since it was well past the hour. But she wasn’t hungry, and the loneliness of sharing a table with herself got to her. So she left without doing much more than picking at her food.

There were four messages on her answering machine. None of them was from John.

She grappled with her dilemma for hours and hours over the next few days. She didn’t answer her phone. If Arlan called with good news—either that John had relented and Templar wanted to go ahead with her book, or that Arlan was moving to another house and was taking the book with him as part of the deal—he would leave a message. But he didn’t call.

Nor did John.

Her loneliness had been bad before, but it was even worse now. Things were over with John. Really over. The emptiness she felt was just like the one she predicted John would feel if he ever let go of his jealousy and hatred. If he’d done that, she would have gladly filled the void in his life. He wasn’t doing it, though, and now she had a void in her own.

To fill it, she turned her attention back to her book. The only emotional energy she had seemed tied to it, and although she had neither a publisher nor a contract, she couldn’t just stop. She had to finish. She had to work John out of her life.

For several weeks, she wrote without a break. It was summertime in New York. Most of her friends were away, and the heat was oppressive enough to keep her indoors. She edited and polished, made calls to check her facts. If she planned to take her book to a new publisher, it had to be
supergood
. Everything had to be backed up so that John wouldn’t be able to pull the stunt he’d pulled with Templar.

Then the unexpected happened. She managed to track down Joe Grogan, the lawyer who had written Eugene’s will. She had assumed he had died, but in her effort to leave no stone unturned she followed a lead and found him retired and living in northern Arizona. On the phone, he was cordial and seemed perfectly lucid. He remembered Eugene well.

The next morning, she flew to Arizona. Grogan, not being an executor of Eugene’s estate, had had no way of knowing that Cutter had never received his bequest. He did remember the codicil, though, and made a sworn statement to that effect, witnessed by his ranch foreman and a local law officer.

Hillary returned to New York feeling both ebullient and terrified. She added Grogan’s statement to her book, but she was uneasy about it. It was disconcertingly real, evidence of a breach of the law. It was a potential firecracker.

For that matter, so was much of what she’d written. John had been right to want her to stop. She wasn’t just telling secrets; she was backing them up several times over. Perhaps because of her connection with Timiny Cove, she found people there who were willing to talk to her. Because of her connection with John, she likewise found people in his circle who opened up. She saw him more clearly than she ever had, and that picture emerged in her book.

Gradually she began to grasp what was in her hands. She had power. For the first time in her life, she had the means to move John in some way, shape, or fashion. It was a daunting realization.

That realization took on even greater meaning in the course of the next few weeks. Summer ended, Labor Day came and went, and business in the city picked up where it had left off. Hillary had dinner with Cutter one night. A week after that, she had lunch with Pam. In both of them she found an air of expectancy. At her prodding, both admitted that it had to do with the company.

One part of her—the part that had loved him for years—wanted to warn John. In her mind’s eye, he stood alone, arrogant and, therefore, defenseless. He had been wrong about the legacy, the beating, and the abortion. He had been wrong about a slew of other things. But he was in for a fall. She felt it in her gut. He was in for a fall, and a part of her still wanted to help him.

She didn’t see how she could warn him. She couldn’t betray Cutter and Pam, after the way they had trusted her. Besides, she hadn’t been in contact with John since the night she had told him off. She thought of calling him now, just to reestablish some sort of contact. But she feared he would hang up on her, and that would hurt.

In truth, she still loved him. She hated him for not loving her back, but she did love him. Her love was insane. Cutter told her so, Pam did, and Arlan did, and she knew they were right. But she couldn’t help what she felt. It was visceral, not rational. She couldn’t turn it off with a snap of her fingers. It was buried deep inside her and had been for twenty-seven long years.

John was part of her. He was the one person who had shaped her more than any other. She had learned that over the past few months. Revenge may have spurred her to write the book, but John was a force behind it in more ways than that. If she had become a dedicated writer over the years, it was to win his praise, far more than to distinguish herself from her family. If she wrote to exorcise her personal frustration, he was at the root of that frustration.

She wished it weren’t so. She wished she didn’t care what happened to him. She wished she hated him more than she loved him. But she didn’t. Whatever his fate, it would touch her.

That was why, when Pam called her on a cloudy Sunday in late September with the news that she and Cutter were meeting with John in the library of the Beacon Hill townhouse the following morning, she asked if she could come.

Chapter 27

F
OR YEARS CUTTER HAD IMAGINED
setting foot inside the townhouse on Beacon Hill. He had imagined what it would look like, and imagined the sense of triumph he would feel. He hadn’t counted on the sense of disappointment he felt as he followed Christian toward the library. The townhouse looked well kept and attractive. It was traditional in decor, although it had recently been redecorated. It was perfect in the same way as dozens of other houses he’d seen were perfect. It had no distinctive character whatsoever.

He didn’t have time to dwell on the sadness of that, or on how different things might have looked had Eugene lived there. Christian opened the double doors and gestured him in with the aristocratic tip of his head. Feeling a sense of anticipation, Cutter went forward. The moment had been a long, long time in coming.

Pam was sitting on a leather sofa looking beautiful. The sight of her enhanced the anticipation he felt. Brendan was by her side, looking twenty years older than he had when Cutter had seen him last. He immediately went over and offered his hand.

“Good to see you Brendan,” he said quietly, meaning it. “How are you feeling?”

Brendan gave a dubious shrug with one brow, then relented, smiled, and nodded.

“Cutter, do you remember my mother?” Pam asked.

He heard tension in her voice along with excitement, and tried to encourage her with a look before he turned to the other side of the room, where Patricia sat in a wheelchair. He had known she would be there. He had also known what she would look like, since Pam had described her to him more than once. It had been years since he’d seen her himself. She looked older now, but lovely in a fragile sort of way. She also looked extremely nervous and vulnerable, both of which he could understand. She hadn’t been in the townhouse since the day of the accident.

He held out a hand, and, out of gut protectiveness, when she put hers in it, he covered it with his free one. Softly he said, “It’s good to see you again, Mrs. St. George. I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m not sure I am,” Patricia whispered.

He smiled and gave her hand a gentle squeeze before releasing it to greet the man standing nearby. “It’s a pleasure, Dr. Grossman.”

“Same here.”

Cutter had never met Bob before, but he liked him on sight. Pam said he was good to Patricia, even in love with her. Aside from that, Cutter was grateful for the support Bob had given Pam over the years.

He hoped some of that gratitude showed in his look, because in the next instant anything remotely relating to pleasure or gratitude vanished from his face. With no one else present in the room to divert him, he turned at last to John.

He had seen the man over the years from time to time, but always from a distance and with people between them. The distance now was no more than ten feet, and there were no people between them, just the venerable mahogany desk behind which John sat.

The last time Cutter had looked directly into John’s eyes was on a cold night in December seventeen years before. He had been a miner then, poor, uneducated, feeling hatred and pain. There was no pain now, but the hatred flooded back, and for a split second it was as strong as ever. In that split second Cutter remembered the threats that had kept him from Pam. He remembered the big brick house in Timiny Cove that had been sold, the baby that had been aborted, the five rows of metal studs that had torn up his back.

Then the split second was over, and the hatred was muted by the civility of the setting, the presence of Patricia and Pam, and his own hard-earned dignity.

He didn’t greet John. John didn’t greet him. They stared at each other in silent challenge, until John finally announced, “If you’re done with the social niceties, perhaps we could get on with this. I have a meeting across town at eleven.”

That left them an hour, which was more than enough as far as Cutter was concerned. He nodded, but before he could speak the door opened again and Hillary slipped in. She looked slightly breathless and more than a little frazzled. After a quick glance around, her gaze settled on John.

“What are you doing here?” he asked in a tone that made Cutter hurt for her.

“I wanted to come.”

“This is business.”

“I know.”

“You haven’t any part in it.”

Pam broke in. “I asked her to come. She has a vested interest in all of us.”

John’s features went even more rigid. “Is she taking notes?”

“No,” Hillary answered for herself. “I’m here as a friend.”

“Whose friend?”

“Yours.”

“And Pam’s, and his.” He jutted his chin toward Cutter. “I sense a confrontation here, Hillary. Better decide whose side you’re on.”

Again Pam spoke, less patiently this time. “There’s no need to take sides.” She glanced at her watch. “Since we have limited time, I think we should start.”

John sat back in his chair and leveled Cutter an icy stare. “I assume you’re here because you own company stock. That’s the only reason I’d allow you in my home. Do you understand that?”

“It is not your home,” came Patricia’s frail voice, drawing every eye in the room her way. “It’s mine. It was left to me as part of my husband’s estate. You live here because I let you. When I decide that you leave, you leave.”