“I’m serious,” she said. “He’s already being a misery. You have nothing to lose. Tell him what you think. Tell him how you felt when he stopped answering your letters. Tell him how you felt before that, when you were at school.”
“Since when do you make so much sense?”
“Probably since I started spending hundreds of dollars on psychoanalysis, darling. I’m for bed. Tell Daniel I adore him, that he should keep an eye out for a care package filled with macarons, and that I’ll see him on Thanksgiving.”
He hung up the phone, feeling like there was only one flaw in Pat’s reasoning: he did have something to lose, even though it was the tiniest and puniest scrap of a thing. He had barely been able to endure chilliness from Everett; he didn’t think he could take outright hostility. Not after his brothers and mother had sent him packing. Not with Pat on the other side of the world. He felt fragile, a blown and painted eggshell, something that would crumple at the slightest mistreatment. And he didn’t think he could stand it if Everett were the one to crush him.
Chapter 4
Everett got halfway to the old Franklin place—he couldn’t quite think of it as Tommy’s house—before realizing he ought to have brought something. He was visiting a person’s new home, a person who had done him a favor no less. And here he was, arriving empty handed.
The previous night’s flurry had only amounted to few inches of snow, most of which had already melted from the street, but it crunched under Everett’s feet as he walked up the gravel driveway. The path leading up to the porch, though, had been shoveled, and the porch itself was swept clean of snow. There was no sign of his grocery bag by the door, which meant that Everett would have to knock. He did so, his heart pounding relentlessly against his ribs.
He was about to raise his fist and knock again when he heard the doorknob rattle and the creak of an ancient hinge as the door swung open. Tommy wore a fuzzy sweater and those alarming denim trousers. His hair was rumpled, as if he had just woken from a nap, despite it being seven in the evening. He looked, in other words, heartbreakingly familiar. Lit only by a dim lamp behind him, he could have been the boy Everett had loved.
Everett’s gaze skittered away, landing on the contents of the house. He got a glimpse of a ladder, a couple of buckets, and some furniture covered in sheets.
“Painting,” Tommy said. “Come in and I’ll give you the cook’s tour.”
Everett wanted to protest that there was no need, that he’d take his groceries and be on his way. But he remembered that he was trying to make an effort to be less standoffish, to make it so Tommy didn’t flinch every time he opened his mouth. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound like he meant it at least slightly. “I’d love to see the place.”
Tommy flashed him a smile Everett hadn’t seen in over a decade, crooked and unguarded and nothing like the smile Cabots pasted on for voters and cameras. Everett felt like he had done something very clever.
The house was—well, frankly it was a disaster. Everett would be the first to acknowledge that he knew little about what houses looked like when they were in the process of being taken apart, or put back together, or whatever was happening here. The entire field of home renovation was a closed book to him. The one thing of which he was certain was that no Cabot, past or present, had ever lived in a place that was missing an entire wall, pipes and wires exposed for all the world to see.
“Plumbing,” Tommy explained, leading the way between the beams that now supported the ceiling and through a rabbit warren of crates and boxes. “And wiring. And I didn’t like that wall anyway. Here, this is Daniel’s room.” He pushed open a door. The walls—all thankfully intact—were freshly painted blue, and the bed was covered in a neat plaid bedspread. A dresser held a model airplane and a photograph of Patricia. “And this is mine.” He gestured across the hall, to a room that was the mirror image of Daniel’s room, but with a large, unmade bed. Everett looked away, feeling vaguely that he had seen too much—not only Tommy’s bed, but the entire domestic fact of this house. Tommy Cabot was a father, and not only that, but one who chose bright blue paint and cheerful curtains for his son’s bedroom. “Upstairs is more of the same, and the less said about the cellar, the better.”
Everett tried to come up with something complimentary to say. “It looks like you’ve been doing a lot of work,” he finally settled on, carefully stepping over a bucket of something mysterious and opaque.
Tommy snorted. “I know it looks bad, but it’s very much in a darkest-before-the-dawn state at the moment. I was able to buy the place outright and still have enough left over to eat, without needing to worry about getting another job right away.”
That made Everett look at him sharply. As far as he knew, the Cabots were as rich as they had ever been. If they sold even one of their homes on Cape Cod, they could probably buy an entire township’s worth of houses nicer than this one. But Tommy was here, not working for his brother’s Senate office or any of his other brothers’ campaigns. He wasn’t working for Patricia’s father’s law firm. He was tearing walls out of a run-down farmhouse that was located near nothing except his son.
“Did something happen to Frank?” Everett asked. “Last I heard—not that I make it a point to follow—oh damn it.” His face heated, so he polished his glasses on his handkerchief just for the excuse to look away. “I thought you were his chief of staff. And, I mean, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that he has his sights set on the White House next year.” He shoved his glasses back onto his face and straightened his tie. “Why are you here, and not in Washington?”
It was none of his business; it was a personal question, the sort of vulgar conversational overreach he had been raised to scorn. But Tommy was tossing out these clues, this trail of breadcrumbs that made it seem like he wanted Everett to ask.
Tommy let out something that might have been a laugh when it grew up. “My services are no longer required. It seems I’m the black sheep of the family.”
“What?” Everett said, genuinely shocked. “You?” Tommy had always done everything his family wanted. He had gone to Harvard and then law school instead of joining the army like Everett and most of their Greenfield classmates. Not only did he marry the daughter of one of Boston’s wealthiest families, but he married at all. “If I had to bet on the Cabots having a black sheep, I’d have put all my money on Frank.”
That must have been the right thing to say, because Tommy laughed in earnest now. “I know. But it turns out the Cabots aren’t interested in sullying their reputation by associating with queers who have estranged wives.”
Everett flinched as if he had been hit. It wasn’t that word—well, it was partly the word, and it was partly that it came from Tommy’s mouth, but it was mostly that Tommy had applied that word to himself.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” Tommy said, and Everett had no idea what he was apologizing for. “This conversation needs wine.”
Everett wanted to decline—it would better to keep his wits about him, his defenses intact. But Tommy was right: this conversation needed wine, at the minimum.