He Will be My Ruin

“Oh, dear. That can’t be good.” Her words are on point, but her tone says she’s more curious than concerned. I replay part of the conversation for her. “So you have something concrete on him, though. Something to hold over his head?” She has a devious mind.

“I do. And it involves Jace paying Celine for her ‘skills.’ ” I haven’t told Ruby about the jump drive video yet. I wasn’t sure that I ever wanted to. To be honest, I’d prefer to destroy it and have no one ever know about or see Celine like that, ever. “Tell me what you know about Grady.”

“Grady?” Ruby laughs and smiles, like I just asked her to tell me about her own grandchild. “He’s such a kind, funny young man. He’s always coming to help me when I need him. Everyone around the building just adores him. And he’s so smart. He can fix anything! The lady in apartment 207 has one of those fancy espresso machines. It just up and stopped working one day and Grady fixed it.”

“But what else do you know? Like, what’s his last name? When did he become the super there? When did he come over from England? What does he do besides smoke pot and fix things?” I fire off question after question. Questions that, frankly, I should already know the answers to about a guy I’ve been sleeping with. I feel like I’m about to lose my dinner all over this glamorous dress.

“Maggie, what’s this about? Are you okay? You’ve gone pale.”

“Jace said that Grady was one of Celine’s clients,” I admit reluctantly.

“Grady? Oh heavens, no . . .” She chuckles. “That’s preposterous. How could he even afford such a thing? Celine wouldn’t have been one of those cheap girls and he doesn’t make all that much.” Shaking her head, she adds, “Don’t listen to that fool. He’s trying to steer you away from himself. You’re on the right track with the moneyman. It always goes back to the money.”

Such a simple and quick dismissal from Ruby—a sharp old lady who knows Grady far better than any of us knows Jace Everett—helps quell the nausea inside me.

But far from completely.

————

I hold the door to our building lobby open for Ruby and she practically floats in, flashing a business card with a phone number written in blue ink. “Theodore asked me out to afternoon tea next week.”

“The Supreme Court judge Theodore Higgins?”

“Retired now. Still uses his business card, though.”

I pull the tail of my gown over the threshold a second before the door would have shut on it. It’s already happened to me once, with the limo door. I’m lucky I didn’t cause the two-thousand-dollar dress any damage. I plan on offering it up for auction to a charity. “For when he’s out on the town, picking up dames?”

Her giggles echo through the cramped, empty foyer. “I haven’t gone on a date in nearly twenty years.” She pauses. “Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to it.”

“You just danced with the man for hours. I think you can handle a cup of tea.” I pause. “Unless that’s code for something else, in which case I really don’t want to know.”

Ruby titters like a little girl as my eyes drift over the rows of little metal mailboxes to our right, landing on “C. Gonzalez” with a dip in my heartbeat. I haven’t collected her mail once. I haven’t even thought about it.

Ruby’s box, “R. Cummings,” is directly below Celine’s. Without even thinking, my gaze scans over the other boxes, searching the names, until I find his near the bottom right corner.

“Oh my God.” I stare at the sticker. “Did you know?”

“Did I know what, dear?”

————

The sound of my two-thousand-dollar dress tearing as I catch the hem on the fence barely registers. Neither does the cold December night, my faux fur white stole a beautiful but useless addition to my ensemble.

He didn’t answer his apartment door. That’s where I marched to first, after ushering Ruby to her place. I stood there and banged on it until someone hollered “go away!” from another apartment.

I figured I would try the roof. Turns out Grady’s quite predictable.

He’s lying in his hammock, his head covered in a toque, a joint held burning between fingers of one hand. Flames lick the sides of his little fire pit, the glow from it catching his eyes as he watches me approach. I’m not sure if him smoking weed is going to help this confrontation or make it worse.

“Aren’t you a sight,” he murmurs, his gaze trailing over me as I weave around the chairs and planters, slipping slightly on the snow-coated roof, my heels not meant for outdoor winter wear.

He lifts the heavy wool blanket up to make room for me. “Did you enjoy your charity ball?”

“Were you one of Celine’s clients?” I blurt out. I’ve never been one for subtleties, but I’d like to think I’ve kept my head through these last few weeks, biding my time and biting my tongue with Jace. Clearly, the situation with Grady is a more emotional one for me, given how intimate we’ve become in such a short period of time.

His first name isn’t even “Grady.”

I don’t know what his first name is.

But I do know now, thanks to his mailbox, that it starts with a “J,” and Celine had a client she called “Jay,” and that means that maybe Ruby is wrong and Jace wasn’t lying to me tonight at all.

My words seem to hang in the air for a moment—either unreceived or incoherent—until I wonder if I actually really said them out loud.

“What? . . . I mean,” Grady’s face twists with confusion, then comprehension, and then shock, “what?”

“Were you one of Celine’s clients?” I say slowly.

He doesn’t answer me right away.

“Did you pay Celine for sex?”

His deep chuckle is not exactly the reaction I expected. When he sees the look on my face, he finally stops. “Oh, you’re serious?”

“Yes, I am.” I take a few steps closer, to get a better look at his face. “Because someone told me that you were.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just answer the question.” The longer this goes on, the more suspicious I become.

“Well, it kind of does matter, because some asshole out there is filling your head with lies!”