Page 7 of Just for Tonight

“Better done by one person. I can keep track of what’s here and what’s not.” I take another drink. It is good Scotch. But Mike needs a task. Hmm. “You should maybe go ’round to Weatherby & Bradshaw, give them the bad news and ask about the will.”

He nods agreement. “No rush. Richard won’t be there before nine. I’ll finish my drink first.”

“Fair enough.” I top up my glass. I’ll have had three by the time Mike works his way through one. Everyone needs a hobby, as they say.

I wish I could think of another job for him. He needs a distraction, but I have no more ideas. Maybe letting him mope isn’t all bad. I’m emptying another drawer of the desk when I find the bundle of cards. Surely, my father didn’t have a stash of love letters? I know he screwed around on our mom, but it seems uncharacteristic for him to have left written proof.

“Hello. What’s this?” The sender is Sylvia Kincaid which gives me a bad feeling about the contents – and the implication. It’s a stack of letters, one or two a year for more than a decade, most addressed to Mike. And they’re here, in our father’s desk.

Seems the old man did something more than threaten Mike’s daughter. Why else would he have these letters squirreled away?

It’s one thing to have hopes for your kids’ futures, dreams and ambitions even, but it’s another to stick your hands into their lives and muck things up. My fury at my father and his meddling ways doubles in that instant, and I haven’t even read the letters.

“Something for you,” I say and toss the bundle to Mike.

“You shouldn’t have,” he replies, but he’s frowning at that top envelope.

I watch him, pretending that I’m not doing so. He opens the top one and I can see that it’s a Christmas card. His throat works and he puts the card back in the envelope, running his finger down the side of the stack.

A penny is dropping.

“Seventeen,” he says, as if that’s important.

Seventeen Christmas cards? A little math is a glorious thing. If this is the story of Mike’s daughter, Sylvia must have left Empire after high school because she was pregnant. Seventeen years would be about right.

The mysteries of the universe are all resolved in time.

“You know what they are?” I ask, but we both know it’s not really a question.

Mike nods slowly. I watch him open the bottom one, which has to be the oldest, and start reading. His shock is palpable.

“Never saw them before?” I guess.

Mike shakes his head. “She told me she wrote. He told me no letters ever came.”

“Someone had to be telling porky pies.”

He frowns down at the next letter, clearly shaken.

I am livid. How dare the old fucker do this to Mike, the kindest and nicest guy ever? How dare our father keep this from Mike for all these years, denying him a connection with his own child – and then threaten the daughter too? In this moment, I hate Patrick Cavendish with the fury of a thousand suns and I thought I already did.

“I never thought he would lie to me,” Mike admits quietly. “I was wrong. He admitted it last night.”

I know it would be smarter for me not to say anything in this moment. The fact is that if our father wasn’t dead, I’d be first in line to strangle the life out of him with my bare hands.

I expect Mike to sit there and read the whole pile, but he straightens with purpose.

“I’ve got somewhere to go,” he says and I know then that Sylvia isn’t far away anymore. She’s here in Empire, with her daughter, and that’s why our father threatened her and that’s why Mike challenged him.

He has a chance of getting what he wants, right here and right now, and I want him to have it with a ferocity that shakes me.

“Of course, you do,” I say with a nod.

But Mike lingers. “How do I fix this?”

Ah, so our father lied and the lovers blamed each other. A story as old as time, and one that I know Mike can get sorted. “Just tell her the truth. Women love that shit.”

“I always have.”