Page 40 of The Suit

This weekend was Memorial Day weekend. Ever since we’d been in school, the three of us had spent this particular weekend at my family’s home in the Hamptons. Up until last year it had always been just us, just boys; partying, resting, spending time away from our studies. The tradition had continued after we left school, and we used the weekend as an excuse to get out of the city, away from work and our busy lives. Our time spent there became sacred, and this would be our fourteenth year.

But last year, Rory had rolled up at the house - uninvited - with some friends, and a group of girls they’d met on the way. It was during that night Bell had been conceived; nine months later, we’d come home from our regular Tuesday night out, to find her on Murray’s doorstep with a note attached saying she was his daughter.

A lot had changed in a very short amount of time; not only because it was no longer the three of us, but it was now impossible to imagine Kit and Bell not being around. Our Memorial Day Weekend festivities now included girls.

“Absolutely, but Kit and I need to come down Sunday now. She’s got some orientation thing at school that lasts all day.” He rolled his eyes like it was the last thing he wanted to do on a Saturday, but in actual fact, he’d pushed Kit into her current job and out of the role of his nanny. She had just been offered the position as research assistant for her old English professor at Columbia, and Murray couldn’t have been prouder.

“Yeah, come down whenever, your room is waiting for you,” I turned to Penn, “yours too, Pennington.”

“Amazing, I need to come Sunday too.’

“You have school as well?”

“No, dummy, but Dylan and the kids are in town so I’m going to have lunch with her, see if she knows why Nancy and grandpa are being shady. She’s bound to have sniffed out something, seeing as she’s such a gossip.”

Dylan was one of Penn’s four sisters, tied favorite with the youngest of his sisters, Lauren. Although it did switch around, depending on how much Lauren was annoying Penn at any one time. Dylan split her time between California, where her husband was the head of a film studio, and New York, so he didn’t get to see her as much as he’d like; at least that’s what he said, though he was always relieved whenever they flew back… likely because all four of his sisters still treated him as the baby, something he strongly objected to.

“Okay. If you change your mind, I’m heading out onSaturday.”

“Cool. And don’t forget we have the Dodgers/Yankees game Monday.”

I gasped with faux shock, seeing as it was the fifteenth time he’d mentioned it this week alone, “Would I ever?”

“Is Rory gracing us with his presence again?”

I shrugged. “Fuck knows. I’ll ask him, and if he does, it will be made very clear he’s not inviting any randoms.”

Murray quietly sipped his beer. Even though he was completely head over heels in love with his daughter, he still carried around a sliver of shame about how she’d been conceived – during a drunken one-night-stand, with very little memory of her mother – however much we told him it didn’t matter. Not that he blamed Rory, but my brother was a law unto himself, and they’d not seen each other since Bell had arrived in our lives.

“Thanks, man.” Murray downed the rest of his beer and got up, “Okay, I’m going to head out.”

I glanced at my watch; I could still get a couple of hours work in before bed, “Yeah, me too.”

“And you can pay for me seeing as you and your dick just lost me a hundred gees,” he grumbled.

“Fuck that,” I nodded over to Penn. “He’s paying.”

I expected an argument, but he already had a wad of cash ready to throw down on the table, sporting a grin I wanted to slap off him.

“My pleasure, boys. Anytime.”

* * *

I reached out and pressed the intercom while vigorously rubbing the towel over my head trying to remove the rest of the excess water.

“Yep?”

“Mr. Latham, it’s Cliff. You have a visitor,” my concierge announced with a strained, slightly pissed off tone, and not anywhere like the cheery professional manner I was accustomed to hearing from him, or hired him for.

My apartment was situated on the top two floors of a building I owned in Greenwich Village. When I’d taken control of my inheritance, including the property portfolio, I’d known immediately that this was the building I wanted to live in. Where my office space in Soho had been used as an old sewing factory turned storage facility before I renovated it, this building had sat empty since the trust board running my inheritance had not decided what to do with it when the last of the previous tenants had moved out. One look at the Italianate architecture and giant floor to ceiling windows, and I had known exactly what I wanted to do with it. I spent two years renovating it, splitting it up into six luxury apartments and keeping eight thousand square feet to myself split across the top two floors, plus an entire roof terrace. I also had a basement floor which I used to house part of my collection of cars and motorbikes - the rest of which was out at my dad’s place in Greenwich under lock and key, and strict instructions that Rory was not to touch under any circumstances.

After I’d hired a building management, I had very little to do with the day to day running, except to have final say on anyone leasing the apartments in the building and anyone hired to work in it; Cliff had been part of that.

“Hey, man,” I replied, waiting for him to continue, “You gonna tell me who it is?”

I heard a shuffling and heated whispering before he came back to the speaker, “She won’t leave her name, sir.”

It took me a second before I broke into a grin, knowing exactly who the cause of his current mood was.

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