Page 56 of Morally Black Betrothal
Entire Agreement.This Agreement constitutes the entire agreement between the Parties to its subject and supersedes all prior contemporaneous agreements, representations, and understandings of the Parties. No supplement, modification, or amendment of this agreement shall be binding unless executed in writing by all Parties.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the Parties hereto agree to the above terms and have caused this Agreement to be executed in their names by their duly authorized officers.
Client’s Signature
Print Name: BRENDAN BLACK
Date:
The Fiancée’s Signature
Print Name: SIMONE BISHOP
Date:
13
DAYDREAMS OR REALITY?
Simone
“You okay? Simone?”
The sound of my name yanked me back to reality like a line on a hooked fish.
It had been happening every day this week. Throughout the night, too. If I was being accurate, this daydreaming had been happening since approximately 8:42 p.m. last Friday, when Brendan Black had left me to make a choice that would change my life…or not.
I smiled at Lincoln, the owner of Cavalier Coffee, the cafe near Northeastern University where I ran my pop-up. The grin he offered back was as cozy as his flannel shirt, beard, and knit beanie. He never dressed like a man who spent his days indoors in the city. More like someone who wanted to go for long hikes before coming home to chop wood in his hometown in Maine.
Our common, small-town New England origins were the main reason he’d been asking me out for the last year. But despite our coworkers trying to push us together, Lincoln had always felt more like a brother than a boyfriend to me.
I wasn’t sure he knew that, though.
“I’m good,” I said as I finished folding up the table. “Just daydreaming again.”
“You’ve been daydreaming all morning. Want to tell me about it over beers tonight?”
I looked up. “Tonight? Oh. I, um…”
“Another time, then.” He took the folding table from me and carried it toward the cafe’s storage area.
I picked up my cash box from where I’d set it on the floor, took a seat at one of the corner tables, and started calculating the cafe’s share while Lincoln and the other employees closed up for the day. I had a few hours to relax until my shift at the bar. A job, I reminded myself, I could quit entirely if I signed the papers folded in my coat pocket.
I hadn’tquitebeen able to bring myself to throw them out last night.
Instead, I’d done my homework. What felt like snooping last week was due diligence today.
A few hours on Google had informed me of all the things the cardiac ICU staff had already known about the Black family.
I learned that Niall Black was eighty-two, with three sons and a daughter from three different women. I learned that he was the son of a construction worker from Cork, had grown up on the mean streets of South Boston, and had parlayed an early gambling business (and ties to the old Irish mob) into the massive holding conglomerate his family ran today.
And I learned that the de facto heir to the whole operation was Brendan Black, who had spent his early years in Southie well before his family moved away, and it was gentrified beyond recognition.
