The Inheritance

‘Don’t you just adore Manhattan? The life. The pulse. The energy. Where else can you find that, man?’


Brett Cranley smiled indulgently at Wilson Rainey. Rainey, a J. P. Morgan private banker from an old Boston family, had worked closely with Cranley Estates for the last five or six years and had become a personal friend. Not that the blue-blooded Wilson, with his impeccable manners and buttoned-down shirts and library full of first edition Mark Twains had much in common with a ruthless, ambitious street fighter like Brett, who never read anything other than the FT and Wall Street Journal. But sitting on the back seat of the limousine together now, on their way back to Brett’s hotel after a successful meeting, Brett marvelled again at Wilson’s positivity. The man was literally never unhappy. Never moody, or tired, or dissatisfied with his lot. Wilson Rainey had lived in New York for the last twenty years, yet he still spoke about the city with all the awe and wonder and adoration of a young man talking about a new and exciting lover. It was contagious.

‘It’s not Manhattan, Wilson. It’s you,’ said Brett. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

He looked out of the window at the frazzled commuters, heading home after a long day toiling away on Wall Street. It was six o’clock, still relatively early, and the air outside was unpleasantly hot and muggy, like soup. This wave of workers were either secretaries and support staff, or traders and salespeople, all of whom would have been at their desks since five this morning and who got to clock off when the markets closed. The M&A guys started later and would work till midnight or beyond. ‘The meeting went well though, didn’t it?’

‘The meeting went awesome.’ Awesome was a word that Wilson Rainey used a lot. He might read like a professor and sit on the boards of God knows how many museums and art galleries and cultural institutions, but when Wilson got enthusiastic about something, his vocabulary was pure high-school jock. ‘You totally owned them, man. They loved you. They wanna do it, for sure.’

‘They didn’t say that,’ Brett cautioned.

Wilson was having none of it. ‘Didn’t have to, man. You could see it in their eyes. I’m telling you, it was a slam-dunk. You ruled.’

By the time they reached the Trump International Hotel, where Brett was booked into one of the Executive Park View suites, Brett got out of the car feeling uplifted and confident once again. He had two more days in New York, but today’s meeting had been the most important, and Wilson was right: it had gone well.

Walking into his palatial suite, he kicked off his shoes, dropped his briefcase on the floor and loosened his tie. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered spectacular views of the city and the furniture, all velvet and leather in various shades of cream, coffee and chocolate, was masculine and luxuriously impersonal, exactly to Brett’s taste. Flipping the television on to CNN, more out of force of habit than for any desire to catch up on the day’s news, he flopped back on the bed, opened his laptop and began skimming through emails.

His mind kept wandering back to Furlings, and to Angela, rattling around the house on her own, or with only Mrs Worsley and the useless Gringo for company. Things were worse than usual between them at the moment. Ange clearly blamed him for ‘driving Logan away’, as she put it. It drove Brett wild with frustration, as if he were living with a Martian. Their daughter had just burned down the neighbours’ property, for God’s sake! If that didn’t entitle him to be angry, to punish her and shout at her and demand explanations, what did? Angela seemed to expect him to tread on eggshells, tiptoeing around Logan’s feelings. As if Logan were the victim here! Good grief.

They’d had the same battle over Jason years ago, with Brett constantly being painted as bad cop. If he’d moped around the way his children did, he’d have been given a good hiding and told to pull himself together, and quite right too. Angela was far too soft on them and she called that ‘love’. But it did them no favours in the end. Brett loved his children every bit as much as she did. He loved them fiercely. But somehow he’d lost both of them, and now Angie was slipping away from him again too.

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