“I didn’t want to do it,” Edwin panted, still swimming. “There’s a price on my head. If you get in too deep with the moneylenders, they play tough.”

“The kind of tough that ends up with a broken leg?”

“Yeah. Atlantic City . . . the cardroom.”

Edwin’s need for a plentiful stream of revenue might explain why Liam’s sudden arrival back in the family was such a threat. Liam was outspoken in his hostility to the steel merger. He could have stoked up the unions and delayed the creation of U.S. Steel. After getting control of his father’s shares, Liam might even have scuttled the deal for good, meaning that the lucrative dividends Edwin expected to earn from the deal would vanish. He’d made a preemptive strike to eliminate the possibility of Liam ever returning to the family.

Patrick released the oars, as did the other men in the boat. Edwin was no longer making any progress. A weak dog paddle was all he could manage, and he finally reached up to grasp the side of the boat, wheezing, his face sick.

“I don’t want to go back to the Black Rose,” he panted. “I don’t want to face them.”

It was understandable. They were only a few hundred yards from the shoreline, but Patrick didn’t feel like spending the rest of the evening traveling back to Manhattan from Jersey City. Sometimes a person didn’t have many choices in life, but Edwin had dug himself into this hole all by himself, and the people around him had suffered enough for it.

A crew member clamped a boarding ladder onto the side of the boat. Edwin still hesitated to take it.

“I can’t force you to climb aboard,” Patrick said. “I don’t want to watch you drown trying to swim to shore, but that’s your choice, not mine.”

Edwin climbed aboard, and the crew members scrambled to turn the boat around. The world’s most awkward family reunion on the Black Rose was about to occur.

40

After Edwin’s shameful fall from grace, Gwen did her best to look forward to her new life. She moved out of her house and onto the Black Rose to live with Liam until renovations to the apartment she’d purchased could be completed, and in September her new life would officially begin.

Liam teased her mercilessly. To his eyes, she had merely changed one college for another. She tried to explain that the safe, cozy world of Blackstone College was a very different place than the intimidating urban environment of New York University, but he wasn’t convinced.

“They’re all just rich college kids,” he said dismissively.

Maybe so, but she was about to embark on a doctorate in botany, something she had always longed for but lacked the courage to get because it meant leaving Blackstone College. She hadn’t been ready before.