Jack passed the family room and heard the television. He stepped into the room to turn it off and found his father right where Jack had left him, in his recliner with a newspaper open on his lap.
“You’re still up.” He wandered in and sat on the edge of the sofa. His father’s depression usually left him exhausted, and he’d been sleeping nearly twelve hours a day. The fact that he was still awake and reading was a great sign.
“I should go up and help your sister,” he said, glancing at Jack over the tops of his reading glasses. “But
just the thought exhausts me.”
Jack smiled. “I’ve got it.”
“Thank you, son.”
Jack hadn’t heard his father call him son in over a year. The warmth of it turned all his frustration into heartache. “I’m leaving for Tampa tomorrow, but I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
His father refocused on the paper and turned the page. “You’ve got a project down there?”
Instead of explaining the complications at work, he simply answered, “Yeah. A client is holding up the approval process.”
His father didn’t seem to hear Jack’s answer. He was smiling at something in the paper.
“What are you reading?” Jack asked.
“I love seeing our employees doing good in the community.”
Jack didn’t have interest in hearing more about Pinnacle and its employees, but he realized he needed to know everything that was going on so he wasn’t blindsided by anything else.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“One of our people working with a veterans’ charity to create low-cost housing that helps vets get off the streets and into a safe space.”
Veterans’ charity. A tingle pricked the back of Jack’s neck. “Who’s doing that?”
“A Miranda Wright.”
A swarm of bees invaded Jack’s stomach. He stood and moved behind his father’s chair to look at the article over his father’s shoulder.
“Says she’s one of our foremen—or forewoman, I guess. Her name sounds familiar, but…” His father shook his head.
Jack’s gaze landed on a photo in the article. Miranda stood beside the shell of a shipping container along with an older man with a prosthetic leg who had his arm around her shoulders. Jack was still trying to fit Miranda into Pinnacle when his father lowered the paper and his gaze went distant. “Randy. That’s it. I heard they call her Randy on the site because it helps her fit in with the men. We usually have one or two women on the crews. Guess she’s one of them.”
Randy.
Jack’s mind flashed back to his site visit earlier in the day. To the welding foreman, straddling a beam fifteen feet above him. And all the bees in his stomach stung him at once.
Miranda? That had been Miranda?
Only now did Jack make sense of the oddity of the way she’d responded to his presence, with nothing but a half-hearted salute. She hadn’t even lifted her helmet.
His brain clicked thoughts together so fast, he couldn’t keep up. He felt stupid, duped. Realized he’d told her confidential information she could have leaked. If that information reached Bruce before the funds transferred back to Pinnacle’s account, the man could begin a legal battle that would last years. The company would never survive.
How long had she known? How well did she know Alex? Jack thought back to the bar the night they’d met. Wondered if she’d known he was coming into town. Tried to remember who had initiated their connection. Had everything between them been part of a plan? Had she targeted Jack at the bar? Come on to him and used sex to get into Jack’s world? A way to get information she could pass on to Alex, who then passed it on to his father?
The sting turned to acid, and nausea rolled in Jack’s stomach. “Can I see that, Dad?”
“Sure.” He closed the paper and handed it to him. “I’m about ready for bed.”
Jack was so caught up in the article, he didn’t even notice his father leave the room. The piece portrayed Miranda as a woman deeply committed to veterans, a love that stemmed from her stepfather, Marty, who had served and lost a leg in the Gulf War. It claimed she had a desire to expand her idea of turning shipping containers into low-cost homes beyond the veteran community to help ease the homeless crisis in America. There was also a smaller photo of a completed home that no one would believe started as a rectangle of metal. Jack was acquainted with the niche of shipping-container homes. He’d never given it any real thought, but he instantly saw how useful they could be in this context.
He lowered the paper and stared blankly out the window. “Why in the hell didn’t she tell me?”