Hadley & Grace(29)

Perhaps he promised that he and Marcia would never get divorced? He dismisses the idea before it fully forms, knowing he never would have promised that. From the day he married Marcia, he knew there was always the very real possibility it would end.

Maybe he promised he would never leave, and that’s what Ben thinks he’s done: left him.

“You said,” Ben mumbles.

Mark looks at him, desperately trying to decode the riddle. Ben’s skin is pink with emotion, his ears heated red, signs of how difficult this is for him.

“You said once we were settled, and when Mom wasn’t so stressed.”

Mark’s thoughts spiral back to two years ago, when they first moved to DC, and a thought tumbles forward through the stressful milieu of that time, his throat closing as he realizes why Ben is upset. Not anger but disappointment—Ben’s persistent silence a result of deep disappointment he’s kept buried for two months now, and heat creeps into Mark’s skin that matches his son’s, his rage so fierce it makes him want to lift the bench they’re sitting on and smash it against the wall.

That’s the thing about divorce, which he tried again and again to explain to Marcia: it’s not just about them; it’s about the damage it does to the kids, to the unit, to the foundation, and to their future. To goddamn everything.

“The dog,” he mumbles to himself out loud. “I promised we would get a dog.”

Ben nods, his nose pinched as he holds back his emotions.

They joked about it, how they would go to the shelter and pick the ugliest mutt they could find, one that no one else wanted. Since Ben could talk, he’s been asking for a dog. Mark was going to get one for Ben’s birthday this year, then again for Christmas. But the timing was wrong both times. Marcia was threatening divorce, making things far too tense to bring a dog into the mix. Ben turned nine, Christmas came and went, and three months later Mark was no longer living at home.

“I know it’s not important,” Ben says, the words quivering. “It’s just . . . you said . . .”

Mark scoots so he is right beside him and wraps his arm around Ben’s shoulder. “It is important. Very important. And I should have remembered.”

Shelly bounds up to them, dripping wet. “Whassup?” she says in the sassy talk she’s been using lately.

Ben straightens and pulls away from Mark so his little sister won’t see his tenderness. “Nothing,” he mumbles.

Mark takes a towel from the bag Marcia packed and holds it open for Shelly to walk into. As he rubs her down, he tickles her through the terry cloth until she begs for mercy; then he releases her to go to the locker room to change.

Mark turns back to Ben. “I’ll look into getting a new place,” he says. “One that allows pets.”

Ben looks up at him through his brow. “Really?”

Mark has no idea how he’s going to afford a place with a yard, but he’ll figure it out. Lately, Mark hasn’t had a lot to be proud of, but he has always been a man of his word, and that’s not going to change. “Really.”

Shelly returns, and together they walk toward the exit, Ben walking a little taller, which makes Mark feel a little better himself.

Marcia and Stan the Insurance Man are waiting at the curb when they walk through the door. Mark loads the kids in the back of Stan the Insurance Man’s Volvo, and when the car is out of sight, he sits on the bench beside the door and drops his face into his hands, the heels pressed against the sockets of his eyes.

When spots begin to swim, he lifts his face, pulls out his phone, and pulls up the Torelli file. He stares at the small screen and scrolls through the pages until the words blur into black blobs on a field of pulsating white.

He’s missing something. He can feel it. There’s always something, a loose thread that, when pulled just right, unravels the whole damn mystery.

Leaning back, he closes his eyes, and Shelly’s gap-toothed smile fills his mind, making him smile. Then he thinks of the note Torelli and Herrick left and the love he felt in it toward the boy, Skipper. Torelli has raised him since he was born, a special-needs child who isn’t her own. It takes a special kind of person to do that. She’s certainly not your typical mobster’s wife or criminal.

Herrick, on the other hand, is another story. Her record of trouble with the law stretches back to her teenage years.

Mark toggles back to her file and opens it, scrolling through page after page of her rough history.

Reading it boils his blood. The system has failed her on so many levels it makes him want to strangle each and every person who’s had a hand in it.

Orphaned at fourteen, she was shuffled from foster home to foster home for the first year, then finally placed with a distant relative who was never properly screened and who turned out to have a drinking problem. He saw Herrick as his ticket to the easy life and kept her out of school so she could work flipping burgers for a paycheck.

When social services discovered what was going on, they moved her to a group home, but group homes don’t usually work out too well for cute, nice girls like Herrick, so not surprisingly, she hightailed it out of there the day after she arrived.

A few months later, she was arrested in Savannah during a homeless sweep. They locked her up in juvie, and from what Mark can gather from the records, social services tried to get her out, but Herrick wanted to stay. When they said she couldn’t, she did small things to extend her sentence—stole things from the commissary, scratched her name in the warden’s door. She probably figured it was safer than another group home or the streets, and she was probably right. When she turned sixteen, she took the GED and then, for the next two years, took vocational classes and online courses. She even got an online associate’s degree in accounting.