Chapter 3: The Ghost of 4th Street
Julian did not eat dinner. He left Victoria at the restaurant with his corporate card, ignored fourteen incoming calls from his public relations director, and walked forty blocks south through the autumn rain.
His leather shoes soaked through the puddles of Lower Manhattan, water ruining the hems of his four-thousand-dollar trousers. He didn't feel the cold. His mind was trapped five years in the past, in a walk-up on 4th Street where the radiator clanked all night and the ceiling leaked into a yellow plastic bucket.
He had been twenty-six, drowning in private equity debt, desperate to prove to his father’s old partners that he was ruthless enough to inherit the firm.
Elena had been an illustrator for natural history volumes, her hands always stained with sepia ink, her heart full of an unyielding belief in human decency. When she had told him about the positive test on a freezing Tuesday morning in November, he hadn't held her.
He had panicked.
“A family right now will destroy my leverage, Elena,” his younger self had snarled in that cramped galley kitchen. “I need thirty million to secure the harbor bid. The partners won't trust an unproven junior with a domestic distraction. We have to terminate this. Or we have to end us.”
She hadn't yelled. She had simply packed her cedar trunk, left her key on the chipped laminate counter, and walked out into the snow. He had told himself it was cleaner this way. He had told himself that children born into debt were a curse. He had taken the thirty million, bought the dry docks, and spent five years dining in gilded rooms, believing he had won the game.
Now, standing on the wet pavement outside the Hastings Foundation headquarters on 5th Avenue, he looked up at the warm amber windows of the residential upper floors.
May you like
He pulled his personal phone from his pocket, dialing his private investigator with a hand that shook so violently the screen blurred.
"Marcus," Julian commanded, his voice raw with rain and bile. "Drop whatever you’re doing. I need everything on Elena Hastings. Every file, every bank record, every doctor's note from November five years ago to this second. And I need it on my desk before dawn."
