Page 44 of The Night We Lost Him

“Isn’t that extreme?”

“Jonathan’s extreme. It’s why he’s good at his job.”

I make a note on the police report about my father’s cell phone, his computer.

“Could Tommy help ease things?” I ask.

“Why would Tommy be able to help ease things?”

“I don’t know. They’re both lawyers. Thought maybe they connected about that. How does Jonathan feel about Tommy?”

“How does anyone feel about Tommy?”

I turn and look at him. “Okay. I’m done with all of your veiled insinuations. What is going on with you two?”

“He’s on-site upstate. We’re finishing the build-out on a new property in Columbia County.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

He doesn’t answer me. He doesn’t even look my way.

“Why are there so many secrets in this family?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “You do what came before.”

“What does that mean?”

Sam turns back to his laptop. “None of this started with us,” he says.

Forty-Three Years Ago

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Cory said. “There’s nothing more to say.”

“Why not?”

“You’re working a hundred hours a week. You won’t even miss me.”

“I miss you right now. I miss you already.”

They were walking around the Strand Bookstore, Cory searching through their new arrivals table. Cory browsing through books, trying to ignore him and this conversation Liam knew she didn’t want to have.

She was right about how much he was working. He had been at Hayes for three months and had put in more hours than most people did in a year. No one understood him even taking the job in the first place.

He’d been a summer associate at Bain Consulting, and everyone assumed he’d accept a permanent position there and all the perks that came with it: a Midtown rental apartment, a six-figure starting salary. But Liam had been assigned to a project at Bain that moved the goalposts for him. He was brought in to analyze a large hotel group, three-star and four-star resorts around the globe, more than twelve hundred properties. He was supposed to be looking for opportunities to cut costs, to eliminate redundant staff positions, to recommend property changes across the portfolio so everything would run more efficiently. Efficiently as in cheaper. No particular interest in better.

This was when he fell in love with the business and his plan started to concretize. Even if he didn’t know all the shapes and colors of it yet, Liam was going to do everything he could to create the opposite.

“Come on, Cory. You can’t tell me that there are no good writing programs in New York,” he said.

Cory picked up a copy of The Hotel New Hampshire, added it to the stack of books in her already full arms, including a fresh copy of Barefoot in the Park. She had given Liam her original copy, had given him a slew of Neil Simon plays. Neil Simon was one of her very favorites.

“University of Southern California has one of the best writing programs in the country,” she said. “They’re giving me a full ride, and I’ll get to focus entirely on my writing. No waiting tables, no babysitting.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“And it’s just for a year,” she said.

“Time is just a construct?”

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