with Leo Plumb and make it clear they weren’t after money, because they weren’t. Vinnie wanted access. He’d done his research and he knew Leo had traveled in the right circles. Leo could put Matilda in touch with the right people and help her with any number of programs where she would get assistance with her prosthetics, including further surgery if necessary. He wanted Leo to pull some strings, and he wasn’t going to give him a choice. He was going to make it clear that he wasn’t afraid to expose him for the coward he was. He’d put on his uniform, stand with Matilda at his side, and humiliate Leo Plumb until he buckled. Leo could come after him and Vinnie would welcome that fight, but he’d never have to engage. Because the other thing he knew about cowards? They were most afraid of being unmasked. This was going to be easy.
“NO,” MATILDA SAID. “Absolutely not.” She’d let the mirror fall to the floor, and she was furiously hopping across the kitchen. “I’m not going to talk about this.”
“We’re going to talk about it.” Vinnie stood firm.
“Get out of here. Please. Thank you for the pizza, the mirror. I’m tired and I want—”
“This—” Vinnie said, pointing to Matilda’s stump, “is bullshit.”
Matilda had her back to him, holding on to the kitchen sink. “Why are you yelling?” she said, turning to him. “Why are you always fighting? Always mad at everyone and everything.”
“Why aren’t you?” In the harsh light of Matilda’s kitchen, Vinnie’s left hand was clenching and unclenching. “Why aren’t you fucking pissed off?”
“Because it doesn’t do any good.”
“I disagree.”
“Maybe you need to tell your brain a new story. Go ahead, use the mirror. Take a look at your face and see how ugly it is when you’re mad.”
He took a deep breath and then he slammed his palm against the refrigerator next to her. She flinched. “Why aren’t you mad enough to ask for what you deserve?” he said.
She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs, her face drawn and bleak. She looked like she might cry; Vinnie had never seen her cry. Matilda couldn’t even look at Vinnie. She’d tried so many times to will herself back into that pantry, back into the before, when Leo was waltzing her to the music. If only she could do it all over again, disengage, walk away from Leo and back to Fernando in the kitchen and pick up her squeeze bottle of vinaigrette. She looked up, somber. “I can’t ask for more because I did get what I deserved,” she said. “I got exactly what I deserved.”
CHAPTER TWENTY–THREE
Nathan Chowdhury had been livid when Leo wanted to sell SpeakEasyMedia.
“It’s ours,” he’d said. “We made the fucking thing and it’s finally doing well and getting bigger and better and now you want to hand it over to a bunch of corporate drones? Why? And do what?” Nathan had argued for weeks but Leo held firm and Nathan couldn’t afford to buy Leo’s half of the business. “I’m done,” Leo told Nathan. “I’m out.”
Leo was tired. Tired of working around the clock and the crappy offices that were one step up from his living room but barely. Tired of the young, clever, petulant glorified interns they employed and had to manage in every conceivable way—Leo felt like a housemother half the time. He’d walked into the tiny conference room twice in one week to find two different couples making out. Someone was constantly letting food go to mold in the tiny refrigerator; the sink was always full of dirty coffee mugs.
He was tired of being broke. Tired of running into friends from college and hearing about expensive trips and shares in the Hamptons and admiring their nicer clothes. Tired of not wanting anyone to visit his apartment because it was still the depressingly nondescript postwar one-bedroom that he’d always illegally sublet, a second-floor apartment where every window looked out onto a neighboring roof of below-code air-conditioning compressors; the rooms actually rattled when they were all going at once.
He was tired of gossip. God, was he tired of gossip. By the time he sold it, SpeakEasyMedia had fully morphed into the very thing Leo most loathed. It had become a pathetic parody of itself, not any more admirable or honest or transparent than the many publications and people they ruthlessly ridiculed—twenty-two to thirty-four times a day to be exact, that was the number the accountants had come up with, how many