Chapter 5
One short cab ride later, Kane could finally escape into his apartment. He leaned on the closed door for a second, allowing himself to relax for the first time. His eyes became more shadowed, lines of worry more defined between his brows. His bag stayed by the front door, a leather heap of memories he didn’t want to deal with yet.
He was officially crazy. Only someone certifiably insane could have gone and tried to scale the wall that Ellen Hunter had put up around herself. She could make a guy feel like an unwashed barbarian with one lift of her patrician eyebrow.
Man, had she read him wrong. Or rather, she hadn’t read him at all. She acted as if she were above that kind of thing but hated him because of an image the press had fed her. He must have imagined the way her eyes darkened when she’d met him.
He had a corner apartment in a new high-rise building on the harbor. The place was light-filled and white, with deep purples and grays in the furnishings, chosen for him by an ex-girlfriend. The kitchen had those white, shiny cabinets they called “European-style,” though when his first-generation Italian brother-in-law had seen them, he’d said they hurt his eyes.
Up here, on the twenty-second floor, he could hear no noise from the city; nobody was anywhere close enough to look in his windows. And even though he loved to bring women back here, he also loved it when he could shut everyone out and be himself.
What did it matter whether or not she made snap judgments about him? With the fires to deal with, he had no time for flirting; no time for anything personal. He knew his position: it was to keep this business running for whichever of his family members ended up taking over. No one else could do it. He’d been the CEO for more than a decade, and only now was one of his siblings joining the company. He couldn’t wait for Megan to graduate college and get started, but he was afraid if there were any more fires, she might not have a company to come to.
At the refrigerator, he checked the date on the milk and picked a bottle of water instead. The cool air billowing around him made him think of the cold night spent watching the fire near the lake. He stayed there for a moment, trying to erase his fear from that night.
Fear... heat... cold...
He was thinking about Ellen again. He slammed the door. He wasn’t going to do that any more, hadn’t he decided already?
Since he hadn’t eaten since that morning, he microwaved two of the frozen dinners one of his sisters must have left behind during a “Kane isn’t taking care of himself” phase. Then, sitting stretched out in the corner of his enormous sectional couch—we’ll have a lot of fun on this, the ex-girlfriend had said, and they had—he lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift up. He might have a sore throat coming on. He had smoked a lot lately. He wasn’t a heavy smoker, and a pack a day was a lot for him, but the last two days had been so draining, he’d needed this crutch more than usual. His mind went back over the fire, the destruction...
The flames blurred his vision. He jerked himself upright and put out the cigarette before he started his own fire. He was unutterably happy to leave his clothes in a heap on the floor and collapse into bed.
• • •
Hours later, he was awakened by the telephone. Instantly on alert, he picked it up fast.
“Kane! Paul.”
“Shit, Paul.” He collapsed back into bed. “You scared the hell out of me. I’m half asleep here.”
“What are you doing sleeping on a Friday night, buddy?” Paul was a record producer and always knew where a lot of pop and movie stars hung out when they were in Boston. He’d brought Kane along to a party a couple of years ago, and Kane had caught the eye of Didi Ravello, an actress in her forties with the body of a twenty-year-old, none of it, Kane soon found out, surgically achieved. He, and the entertainment industry, had never looked back. It was thanks to Paul that Kane had made it into both Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly in the same month.
“Just saw you on TV,” Paul said.
Kane groaned, putting out a hand for his cigarettes. “Oh, great.”
“Dude, you couldn’t have asked for better coverage. You know how many girls want to meet you tonight? It’s the hair, I swear to God. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you had a stylist standing behind the camera in Grand Rapids.”
So he’d been right about the camera. “It was too dark to see anything except the fire.”
“Yeah, man, lighting. You are literally a hot mess right now. Lit up all those angles and cheekbones and what not.”
Kane shook his head. Paul could, and often did, turn anyone into a commodity. Until now, Kane had found it funny. “What do you mean, tonight?”
“Stephanie Seton’s launch party? The new studio?”
Damn. And Kane had told Stephanie personally that he’d go. He really did like her photographs, which for this show were black and white celebrity shots, juxtaposed with homeless people photographed in the exact same clothes and locations. His girlfriend at the time had been one of the celebrity models and had raved about the shoot, and he and Stephanie had stayed friends after the girlfriend had gone off to her next movie.
“Sorry, I... You know, a little distracted here.” After the last few days, it would be nice to get back in the swing of things. “Are you picking me up?”
“I’ll have the car get you first, then me. He’ll be there in half an hour. Do you, in your comatose state, remember Cassandra?”
A sweet girl he’d met two weeks ago at Paul’s studio. She’d been recording her first album. Mostly Kane remembered that she was trying not to look terrified by the hype surrounding her amazing voice. It had been before the first fire, and therefore a lifetime ago.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, she’s told me specifically she’s hoping to see you there tonight.”
