The Reckoning
They thought he was a ghost from a forgotten world. They didn’t know he owned the ground beneath their feet. The reckoning was not coming.
It was already here. CHAPTER 1: THE TOAST
The champagne flute was cold and offensively delicate in my hand. Its stem, thin as a bird’s bone, felt like it would snap between fingers calloused by forty years of turning wrenches and wrestling steel.
The liquid inside, a pale gold bubbling with light, cost more than the first engine I ever rebuilt. I was a ghost in this room, a relic of grease and iron haunting a palace of crystal and silk. The ballroom of the Drake Hotel was a galaxy of shimmering light.
Hundreds of tiny flames danced in the chandeliers above, their glow catching on the diamonds that glittered on the necks and wrists of the three hundred guests. The air was thick with competing perfumes—expensive, cloying scents that probably had French names I couldn’t pronounce. Beneath it all was the smell of money: the leather of new shoes, the starch in crisp shirts, the faint chemical tang of dry-cleaned tuxedos that cost more than most people’s monthly rent.
I stood in my assigned corner, a shadow among the shining crowd. My suit was a cheap polyester blend I’d bought off the rack at a discount store three years ago. It had been too tight then, and forty more pounds of age and weariness hadn’t improved the fit.
The fabric pulled across my shoulders when I moved, and I could feel the seam at the small of my back straining with each breath. The white shirt underneath was yellowed at the collar despite my best efforts with bleach, and there was a small grease stain on the left cuff that wouldn’t come out no matter how hard Martha—God rest her—had scrubbed it before she died. I was acutely aware of how I looked.
The other men in the room wore their tuxedos like second skins, moving with the easy confidence of people who attended events like this every weekend. Their bow ties were perfectly symmetrical, their cummerbunds sat exactly where they were supposed to, and their shoes gleamed like mirrors. I looked like a janitor who had wandered into the wrong building.
But I was here for Jason. For my son. For his happiness.
That’s what I kept telling myself as I endured the sidelong glances and the barely concealed smirks. That’s what I repeated like a mantra as Richard Van Dort, my new in-law, had greeted me in the lobby with a handshake that lasted exactly one second and eyes that never quite met mine. “Bernie,” he’d said, my name in his mouth like something distasteful he needed to spit out.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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