Now, he regarded Parker with a deadly gaze. “Do you think any less of Charlie because of what she went through?” he asked softly.
Parker shifted in his seat. “Hey, like I said, I’m not the issue here. But it looks like you and your dad are making headlines,” he said, focusing back on me. “This business he’s mixed up in with this dead doctor in New England is a hot story, and this just poured a truckload of gasoline right onto the flames. Nearly all the tabloids led with it.”
I winced. Sensing I was about to launch into another—longer and more profuse—apology, Sean cut in again.
“How bad’s the damage?”
“Bad enough,” Parker said flatly. He rubbed a hand across his eyes, slowly, pausing to squeeze the bridge of his nose before allowing the hand to drop away.
Bill’s face had darkened. “Besides all the questions about Fox’s colorful past,” he said, “we’ve been fielding accusations all day that we, as an agency, condone illegal activity by our clients and turn a blind eye to whatever they do while they’re under our protection.” He spoke without inflection, but the words were more than enough on their own.
Parker let out a breath, wry. “I think our legal bills this week will be enough to put both my lawyer’s kids through college.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, narrowly resisting the urge to hang my head. “Easy for me to say, Parker, I know, but I am. If I hadn’t believed my father was in genuine danger, I never would have gone in there in the first place.”
“Hell, I know that, Charlie,” he said. That weary smile again. His disappointment was harder to take than his anger would have been. “I knew when I hired you—both of you—that you were not the type to walk away from a situation, and I wouldn’t ask you to. I’m just having a real bad day.”
Something in his tone alerted me and I was aware of a plummeting sensation in the pit of my stomach, like an express lift or the first long drop of a roller-coaster ride. And I knew.
“The banking people pulled out,” Sean said suddenly, as though he’d been plugged straight into my central nervous system, too. It was not a question and I saw from both Parker’s and Bill’s faces that it didn’t need to be.
Parker opened his mouth, frowning, then shut it again and shook his head a little.
“I had a call this morning,” he admitted, “from the personal assistant to the personal assistant to the CEO—not the guy himself—informing me that they were reconsidering their options. Which is doublespeak for ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ I guess.”
“I’m—” I began.
“—sorry. Yeah, I know,” he finished for me. “Question is, what do we do about it?”
“Well, can’t you re-present to the bank?” I said. “Won’t they let you explain the circumstances behind what happened and—”
“Do you want us to go?” Sean cut in, chopping me off in mid-breath as well as mid-sentence. “If it would cause you the least embarrassment to be seen to take decisive action, I won’t hold you to the agreement we have.” He paused, impassive, as though this didn’t mean everything to him when I knew plainly that it did. I knew what it was costing to keep his voice so coolly polite, indifferent, and—from Parker’s sudden immobility—he did, too.
For a moment neither man spoke. Bill twitched, as though desperate to put it to a vote and I knew which way he’d go. The silence stretched, gossamer thin in the over-dry, purified and conditioned air.
“For God’s sake,” Parker said at last, “will you take that damned stick out of your ass long enough to sit down? Both of you,” he added. “No, I don’t want you to go, okay? If you hadn’t been on board, Sean, we wouldn’t have stood a chance with the bank in the first place. This dies down fast, maybe they’ll come around. And if not, fuck’em. There’ll be other clients.” He gave a rueful little smile. “But not if we don’t figure this out—pronto.”
Parker rarely used bad language and, when he did, he sounded uncomfortable, as though it was something he felt was required of him rather than coming from the gut. There was more than a hint of bravado there, too. I knew what he’d put into trying to secure this contract and losing it would cost more than money. It was a question of face. In this game, reputation was everything.
I thought of the months of hard work, of the investment that had just been laid to waste and I wondered, had the positions been reversed, if I would have been so gracious. Probably not, I realized with a certain sense of shame. After all, my father had screwed up big-time as well, and look how I’d reacted to him … .
Without speaking, both Sean and I reached for the nearest chairs, slumping into them. As soon as I relaxed, my leg started muttering about being overworked and underpaid. Below the level of the tabletop, I surreptitiously jammed my thumb and forefinger hard into the muscle along the front of my thigh in an effort to persuade the nerves to gate.
Parker glanced at the pair of us, almost defiant, the hint of a smile lurking at the edge of his mouth. “So, Charlie, question is, what do we do about the situation with your dad?”
Across from us, Bill made a sound, like he was clearing his throat, but it could have been a growl. It was pretty clear that his choice of immediate action would have been to have both of us flayed alive and thrown off the roof of the building.
“‘We’?” I queried.
“I need this situation contained, and I need it contained fast,” Parker said. “I thought your dad was a well-respected guy. When we hired you, our searches on your family”—and he smiled slightly in apology “—came up clean. What the hell happened over the last six months?”
“I’m as amazed by his behavior as anyone else,” I said. “I dread to think how my mother’s going to react when …”
My voice trailed off slowly before I could finish. I felt three pairs of eyes swivel in my direction but I didn’t see them. My sight had turned inwards, riffling through the disordered filing cabinet of memories and senses.
“If you feel anything for your mother, Charlotte,” my father had said, “then just leave me here and go before it’s too late.”
“Oh my God,” I murmured. “My mother …”
“Do you think your mom even knows what’s happening?” Parker asked, not quite catching it. “If she doesn’t, then I don’t envy you the task of telling her what her husband’s been up to.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s trying to protect her.”
“Oh, yeah, of course,” Bill said, unable to maintain his silence any longer. He threw up his one remaining hand in frustration and I saw his other shoulder hunch as the ghost of his amputated arm tried to join the party. “Okay, so this guy got caught with his pants down, but, hey, that’s okay because he’s ‘trying to protect her.’” The sarcasm overflowed to the point where it dripped. “How the hell do you figure that?”
“No matter what I, personally, might think of my father,” I said, pinning him with a fierce gaze, “I happen to know he’s a brilliant surgeon. And you know what makes him so bloody good at his job? It’s because he’s put whatever classifies as his heart and his soul into what he does for more than thirty years. I find it very hard—no, make that impossible—to believe he’d just throw all that away for the chance of a cut-price lay.”
“People change,” Parker pointed out. “They have … breakdowns, crises, or they simply burn out. Ever considered that?”
It was Sean who shook his head. “To burn out professionally you have to have some kind of emotional overinvestment in your work, and Richard Foxcroft’s a very cold fish,” he said. “But I would say that he does care about his wife—very much so.” He glanced sideways at me. “And his daughter.”