Also, he had to admit that his proposal had been damned good. Even better was Mindy’s pitch to publishers: No one knows who Jay Gould is anymore, she’d written in her cover e-mail. Yet no one had heard of some Olympic track star shot down in World War II, but Unbroken was a massive bestseller. Nor had anyone heard of a serial killer who menaced Chicago during the World’s Fair, which didn’t stop readers from buying The Devil in the White City: It’s all in how the story is told.
And Danny knew how to tell the story. Jay Gould was a railroad speculator and a strikebreaker and one of the richest men in America, an inside trader and a virtuoso at bribery, a scammer and a liar who actually bragged about being “the most hated man in America.”
Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster had all bid, but Louisa at Triangle had topped them all. The money sounded good at first-until you subtracted Mindy’s fifteen percent and spread the payments out over the three years, at least, it would take him to write the book. Plus, a big chunk of the money wouldn’t come in until the trade paperback was published, at least a year after the hardcover. Not that he was complaining: He got to do what he loved, and if he lived frugally and didn’t go on any trips to the Caribbean, he could have made it.
But then came the call from Sarah.
His ex-wife had just gotten the results of a biopsy. There’d been no lump, nothing on a mammogram. Just a little warmth and redness in one breast she noticed one day. The skin felt different, hard and taut like an orange. Her lymph nodes were enlarged. Her doctor had told her it was probably an insect bite, and he’d prescribed antibiotics.
Her doctor was wrong.
The survival rates for inflammatory breast cancer weren’t great. She was a single mom, and she was frightened.
One minute Danny was researching the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886, and the next he was Googling estrogen receptors. Sarah’s second husband had taken a job at a firm in Manhattan, and their eventual breakup had been acrimonious. And the guy was a jerk, as Sarah had finally come to realize. She needed Danny’s help.
He began eating a lot of cafeteria meals at the Dana-Farber cancer center.
For the first time in years, his daughter actually seemed to need him around, too. She needed a steadying presence. She also needed someone to drive her to dance practice and play rehearsals and sleepovers. While he waited in the cramped back room of the dance studio, he researched chemotherapy and radiation and hyperthermia and raw apricot seeds and vitamin B17.
And Jay Gould moved to the back burner.
Because Mr. Gould, as fascinating as he was, wasn’t as important as Danny’s daughter, or his ex-wife, whom he’d never stopped loving even when she stopped loving him.
“Danny?”
“What?”
“I said, we need to figure out what’s next. How soon can you get me a hundred, hundred fifty pages? To see if we can keep them on the reservation. Keep her from canceling.”
“You think that’ll do it?”
“Might. Who knows? It’s the only card I have to play. So you’ll do it?”
Danny wasn’t even close to having a decent hundred-plus pages, and he wouldn’t be for at least a month. But if the book was canceled, there went his entire income stream.
Danny swallowed hard. “No problem,” he said.
5
Lucy looked at him, arched her brows, and smiled sadly. “How bad?”
“Very.”
He told her what Mindy had to say. And about his meeting with the head of school.
And then about the surprise loan from Thomas Galvin.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s generous.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic.
“Lucy.”
She avoided his eyes.
“Let’s hear it,” he said.
“Well, are you sure that’s really a good idea?”
“Why not?”
“I just think it’s weird for this guy who doesn’t even know you to pay for your daughter to go on a trip.”
“It’s unusual, I’ll give you that. Though he invited us over for dinner tomorrow night.”
“I work tomorrow night. I mean, if I was even invited. Does Abby know about this?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Never underestimate teenage girls. They notice everything. And they can be manipulative. Believe me, I used to be one.”
“Maybe.”
“I just think it’s not a good idea to borrow money from this guy you barely know. It just-well, it sends up a red flag.”
“You know what’s not a good idea? Charging five thousand bucks for a friggin’ school trip to Italy. The way this school just takes for granted that parents can shell out that kind of money.”
“You’re just figuring this out?”
“No, but it still annoys me. What it’s doing to Abby.”
“So we’re really talking about Abby’s new friend.”
“Abby gets driven home from the Galvins by a Hispanic servant wearing a chauffeur’s uniform, okay? There’s something wrong with that.”
“I wouldn’t mind it.”
“She’s a kid. And it’s not her life. It’s someone else’s.”
“Exactly. That’s not her life, and she knows it. That kind of thing isn’t going to turn her head.”
“How could it not? It’s like when someone says to you, ‘Doesn’t that tag inside the neck of your T-shirt bother you? Doesn’t it itch?’ And all of a sudden, what do you know?-it does itch. That tag starts driving you crazy.”
“The itch being-what? Living with a father who adores her but doesn’t happen to be a zillionaire?”
They heard the squeak of the front-door hinges, the thud of Abby putting down her backpack, the thump-thump-thump of Rex’s tail against the floor. Abby was talking to the dog as if he were either a young child or a moron. “How was your day, Rex? Have you been a good boy? Oh, why is your collar still on?” The dog’s prong collar jingled. “Let’s ask Daddy if he remembered to take you out for a walk.”
When she walked to the kitchen, she looked more like a woman, less like a girl. In the couple of months since she’d become best friends with Jenna, she’d started dressing differently. Instead of her everyday uniform of light blue Juicy sweatpants and a plaid fleece-lined flannel shirt, untucked, she’d wear preppy-looking twin sets and leggings. She’d started using makeup. He wanted to tell her to stop, slow down. You have your whole life to be a grown-up. You only get to be a girl for a few years.
“For you.” She pulled an envelope from the pile and dropped it on the table. He recognized the cream-colored paper stock of a Lyman Academy envelope. “Looks like another bill,” she said. “Are we behind on the tuition again?”
“We’re fine,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. You have dinner yet? I’ve got some shrimp and linguine left, if you want it. Or I could make, I don’t know, macaroni and cheese?”
“No, thanks,” she said, her tone softening a bit. “I ate at the Galvins’.”
“Great,” he said, trying to sound upbeat. Lately she’d been having dinner most nights with Jenna and her family. Who could blame her? Dinner with just the two of them was often strained, punctuated by long silences. But still…
“I guess I get to meet them tomorrow night.”
She nodded. “I know. You’ll like them a lot.”
“Hey, Abby,” said Lucy, coming up from behind and giving Abby a quick peck on the cheek. “I love those flats. Tory Burch?”
Abby looked uncomfortable but, at the same time, pleased. “I guess.”
Danny used to worry about how his daughter would get along with his girlfriend. But she and Lucy seemed to be friends. Maybe it was because Lucy never tried to take Sarah’s place. Maybe it was because Abby wanted another mother figure in her life. Maybe it was because Sarah had married a man Abby didn’t like.