“Hey, how you doing,” Dexter said, grinning in a way that made it clear he already knew all about Kenji’s plan to set them up. “And don’t worry, we’re just business partners. Suro is all the way single and ready to mingle—with the ladies.”
“And I’m Tetsuro Nakamura, Kenji’s father,” Hot Asian Dude said, throwing his business partner a distinctly unamused look.
“But all his friends call him Suro,” Dexter added, still grinning.
“Hi, Suro,” she said, happy to finally know his name, even if she was mortified by the circumstances. “So it looks like our kids have hit it off.”
“Yes,” he said.
They continued to stare at each other, her not knowing what to say, and him clearly preferring silence to speech.
“Mom, Mr. Dexter, Kenji, and I are going to go stand somewhere else. You and Kenji’s dad should talk,” Sparkle said.
“About the terms of your future relationship,” Kenji added, as if Lacey and Suro had no clue why they were abandoning them like scheming sitcom characters.
And then they were all gone, and though she and Suro were surrounded by food and people, Lacey couldn’t help but feel they were standing in an empty field, alone, with the strange current running between them, his hand glued to her arm.
“Refill your plate,” he said. “We can find a space to eat over there.” He gestured behind him.
“I’m not that hungry anymore,” she told him truthfully.
“You should eat anyway,” he said. “You worked up quite an appetite last night.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “In that case, you should eat, too. If I’m remembering correctly, you were right there with me.”
His face remained impassive, but she could see a spark of humor in his eyes when he finally let go of her arm and grabbed a plate of his own.
As awkward as the rest of the brunch should have been after that, it really wasn’t. She actually found Suro easy to talk to as they both ate off of paper plates, seated on a picnic blanket underneath a shady oak tree.
She talked mostly about Sparkle and how much her daughter had enjoyed her first year at Rise Academy. “I really didn’t want to send her at first. It’s a lot of money and I didn’t want my baby so far away. But you know, she was having a hard time in public school. The teachers didn’t really understand her and she had no friends. She’d stopped having meltdowns around third grade, but then we moved to a different part of the city. One year at her new school, and they were back with a vengeance. I didn’t know how to help her, and she was so miserable and out of her element in the new school, she applied to Rise Academy on her own. She told me she couldn’t take it any more in—“ she stopped herself, not wanting to give away where they lived. “—where we were living. It began to feel like I was being selfish by keeping her with me. So I let her go. It’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made.”
Suro gave her a grave nod. “For me, too. Kenji has a similar story. He went to private school, but even there he had a hard time fitting in. I travel out of town on business a lot, but it seemed every time I came home there were messages from his teachers and administrators wanting to meet with me about him. He didn’t apply to Rise Academy on his own, but he did get my business partner to convince me he would be happier here.”
She shook her head. “It’s strange, because every other mom I know thinks I’m so unlucky because my daughter’s autistic, but they don’t get that your kid is your kid and you love her just as much as they love their kids, even the weird stuff. As hard as it was to deal with Sparkle’s tantrums sometimes, I still get sad when I come home from work and she’s not there.”
“Same,” Suro said. “My job requires a lot of travel, but when Kenji was living with me, I limited myself to three-day trips. Now I can go wherever I want for as long as I want during the school year, but no matter when I return, the house is empty. I have been looking forward to summer with my son for a long time now.”
“Me, too,” she said. He had probably said more words to her in that one pass of conversation than he had the entirety of their heat-fueled night.
Remembering that night made her uncomfortable now, though. She shifted on the blanket, trying not to think about how less than twelve hours ago his fingers, his dick, and his tongue had all taken turns inside of her. Or how good they had felt.
As if picking up on her sexual thoughts, he gave her a heated look and said, “I would like to see you again.”
“I have to head back to the dorms soon and get the rest of Sparkle’s stuff.”
“Same for Kenji and me. But we can have a late lunch afterwards.”
Real regret pooled in Lacey’s heart when he said that, but she made a big show of looking at her watch nonetheless. “That’s a great idea. How about if Sparkle and I go now and we meet you and Kenji back at your guest cabin at, say, two?”
He nodded, and they both stood up.
She tilted her head with a rueful smile. “I guess I’ll just give you a hug goodbye since there are people watching, and we don’t want to encourage the kids any further than we already have.”
Again his face remained impassive, but his eyes glinted with humor. “I’ll take the hug for now,” he said.
However, when she wrapped her arms around him, he leaned down and whispered in her ear, “But I’ll be taking much more later.”
BUT LATER NEVER CAME. To her credit, the woman from the bar only made them wait twenty minutes beyond the appointed time when the room phone finally rang. It was the front desk, saying someone who had referred to herself as “Sparkle’s mom” had asked the receptionist to convey the message that something had come up and she and her daughter wouldn’t be able to make it to lunch.
“Is that all she said?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” the receptionist answered.
He thanked her for the call and placed the receiver back in its cradle.
“Who was that?” his son asked.
“Sparkle and her mother won’t be able to make it to lunch,” he repeated, his voice almost as flat as Kenji’s.
“Why not?”
“She didn’t say,” Suro answered.
“What about you two getting married?”
Suro had to fight hard to hold on to his patience then. “You’ll have to let that notion go. It’s unlikely I’ll ever see her again.”
“No,” Kenji said, suddenly morphing from a musical prodigy into a forlorn toddler. “I want to work on the opera with Sparkle! I know you liked her mom. You were talking to her and you never spend that much time talking to people other than Uncle Dexter and me. What did you say to her? Why isn’t she coming?”
If Kenji had been a normal twelve-year-old, he might have tried to reason with him or even done what his own father would have in the same situation, reminded his son who was the adult and who was the child.
But then if Kenji were a normal twelve-year-old, he and his mother, Yumiko, would still be married and Suro wouldn’t find himself in the position of having just been stood up by his one night stand.
As it was, he didn’t say anything to his son. Kenji was advanced far beyond his years in the I.Q. department, but when he got upset, he reverted to the temperament of a three-year-old. Suro knew from experience anything he said would only make the coming meltdown worse.
So he remained still as the boy cried and kicked and screamed until he finally wore himself out and let Suro carry him into the second bedroom to sleep it off. Kenji hadn’t had a fit that bad in years.
Anger filled Suro’s heart as he walked out of his son’s room, quietly closing the door behind him.
Let it go, he said to himself. She wasn’t an enemy of one of his clients, or someone he had good reason to remove with a few shots from his silenced gun. She was just a woman, someone he’d met at a bar. She wasn’t worth it.
He clenched and unclenched his fists.
But he couldn’t let it go. She had made him feel things like desire and need and camaraderie and at that moment, anger. More anger than he had allowed himself to feel in a very, very long time.
He picked up his cell and called Dexter, “I need everything you can find on Sparkle’s mom,” he said when the other man came on the phone.
“So you going to ask her out after you get the background check?”
If only Dexter knew. “Don’t worry about why. I just want everything you can get on her.”
“Well, do you have a name other than ‘Sparkle’s mom?’” Dexter asked. “That might be a good start.”
Another wave of anger stole over him as he realized he didn’t even know her name. And when he looked back on their conversations, he realized it was more than that. He didn’t know her name because she hadn’t told him. She had talked more than any woman he’d ever been intimate with, but she hadn’t told him one specific detail about herself, not her name, not where she lived, nothing he could use to track her down.
“Hack her daughter’s school records and go from there,” Suro said.
Dexter whistled. “It’s like that, huh? Alright man, I’ll get back to you.”
Suro and Kenji were back at their house in Miami before Dexter called back with any real information.
“Listen, are you sure you want to pursue this woman?” Dexter said after a short greeting.
“What did you find?” Suro asked.
“A goddamned mystery that’s what,” Dexter answered. “First of all, her name is Lacey Winters, but the address she gave the school is bogus. It looks like a crack house in Philadelphia has been on the receiving end of a lot fundraising mailers from Rise Academy.”
So she hadn’t just failed to let him know any personal details, she’d actually submitted falsified information to her daughter’s school.
“So after finding out the address was bogus, I did what we always do, followed the money. But there wasn’t nothing to follow. Sparkle ain’t on scholarship, so her mom didn’t have to fill out any financial paperwork on the kid. And according to her online docs, Lacey paid the whole tuition up front at the beginning of the year in cold, hard, untraceable cashier’s checks. So though this is usually the point where I start investigating the parent, you know what I had to do next, right?”
“Work the kid.”
Dex and he weren’t the most upstanding men on the face of the earth, not by a long shot. But they had hard and fast rules that they lived by. They only took on clients they respected, ones without current ties to criminal or drug trafficking operations. They never killed women, even if the proposed target was as evil or even more so than the men Suro agreed to take care of for a very high price. And they always tried to keep kids out of their cases. Both Dex and Suro knew from experience what a shit hand you could get in the parent department through no fault of your own. They didn’t like using kids to get to their parents.
But while adults could cover their online footprints better than most, unless parents kept their kids completely sequestered, it was impossible to keep them out of electronic systems, mostly because they had to attend schools and get doctor forms in order to attend those schools.
“Her medical forms were all filled out by some free clinic in South Dakota—again, I doubt she lives there. It’s one of those places where they’ll see anyone, don’t matter if they have insurance are not. So yeah, I had to hit up the kid’s social security number. You said Lacey told you Sparkle was in public school before she came to Rise, so I’ll probably be able to track her down that way, but it’s going to take me a few days to get an exact location.”
That was fine. Suro had no plans to deal with the woman from the bar until his son was ensconced back at Rise Academy for the year anyway.
But Dexter had more to say. “Meanwhile my preliminary investigation brought up some strange shit, which is why I’m calling you now as opposed to later when I had all the information you wanted.”
“What was that?” Suro asked, truly curious. This woman, Lacey, had faked her address, her child’s transcripts, and had gone out of her way to get medical forms for her kid from a free clinic in a state she probably didn’t live in. What else could there possibly be?
But then Dexter dropped the biggest bomb of all. “It’s true Sparkle was born twelve years ago to a woman named Lacey Winters, but according to these documents I’m looking at, both of them died in a fire when Sparkle was two.”
CHAPTER 5
Three Months Later
“LET
me get this straight,” Lacey said, rubbing her temples. “You know who did this, but you’re refusing to tell me his name.”
“I’m very sorry, Ms. Winters, I know you must be eager to thank your gracious donor, but the donor requested anonymity,” Kate Lowell, Rise Academy’s bursar, answered.
Lacey squeezed the old burner phone she used for calling her daughter’s school tight against her ear. “I don’t understand. Sparkle’s not even on scholarship. Why would someone just pay her full tuition for the year?”
“We find donations aren’t always need-based. On occasion, a donor sees something rare in a student and decides to invest in his or her future. And your daughter is a musical prodigy.”
“Yeah, but has anyone ever decided to invest a full year of tuition in the future of a non-scholarship student?”
“Well, no,” answered Ms. Lowell, her voice faltering a bit. “But we certainly appreciate the donor’s generosity.”
Ms. Lowell didn’t seem to have any problem with some anonymous donor just deciding to pay Sparkle’s tuition out of the blue, but Lacey was deeply unsettled. She had been living on the bare minimum of her salary for the past year in order to save up the money for her daughter’s insanely high tuition. And even then it had taken until the week before she was set to drive Sparkle back to gather all the funds.
She’d gone to multiple Western Unions and 7-11s all over Chicago in order to put the money into cashier’s checks—the only way to get cashier’s checks without having to show ID or leave an online trail behind was to get them in small amounts. Then she’d driven her daughter the grueling forty-eight hours to school, only to find out her tuition had already been paid for the current school year. And when she’d tried to question the receptionist at the bursar’s office further about it, she’d been told she’d have to direct any further questions to the bursar herself, who wouldn’t be in until the following Monday.