Marcus put his head in his hands and let himself feel it. All the grief and fear and exhaustion he’d been holding back for days. He thought about Sarah, wished more than anything that she was here to tell him what to do. She’d always been better at this, better at seeing solutions when all he could see were walls. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to the empty kitchen, to her ghost or memory or whatever remained. “I tried. I swear I tried.”
The house was silent except for the ticking clock and Alicia’s muffled crying. Tomorrow Frank would come. Tomorrow Marcus would have to admit defeat. Tomorrow he’d start making calls about where they could stay, what he could afford for rent, how they’d manage with no assets and no prospects. Tomorrow everything changed.
Marcus gathered up the bills, put them back in their folder, and went to bed. But sleep didn’t come, and he lay there in the darkness trying to figure out how to tell his daughter that her mother’s dream for her was dead, and it was his fault for not being strong enough or smart enough or lucky enough to save it.
Nathan Cole’s penthouse overlooked Lake Michigan from the forty-third floor, all glass and steel and carefully curated modern art. It had been featured in Architectural Digest, and people who saw it always said the same thing. It was stunning. Beautiful. A masterpiece of urban living. Nathan had never told any of them that he hated it.
He stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows on his first night back from Kansas, looking out at the city lights spread below him like scattered diamonds, and felt the familiar emptiness settle over him like a weighted blanket. The penthouse was five thousand square feet of luxury, and every inch of it felt cold and dead and wrong. There was no warmth here, no lived-in comfort, just expensive furniture arranged by an interior designer and cleaned twice weekly by a service Nathan never met face-to-face.
The refrigerator was stocked by a meal prep company. His mail was sorted by his assistant. His dry cleaning appeared in his closet like magic. He lived like a ghost in his own life. Nathan walked away from the windows and into his home office, a room dominated by a desk that cost more than Marcus Hill’s truck. On the desk was a photograph in an expensive frame, the only truly personal item in the entire penthouse.
Nathan at eight years old, standing between his parents at some long-ago Christmas. His father had his arm around his mother’s waist, and she was smiling at the camera, and Nathan was grinning with the gap-toothed joy of a child who still believed his family was permanent. The photo had been taken six months before everything fell apart.
Nathan picked it up, studying the faces of people he’d barely recognized. His father was probably in California right now with his second wife and their two kids, children Nathan had never met and probably never would. His mother was in a cemetery in Connecticut, buried next to grandparents Nathan had never known because she’d been estranged from her own family when she died.