I had a flash of Jay sitting across from me at Ambrosia on Huntington, the last time we’d seen each other socially, and he was laughing, a heavy Scotch glass half filled with gin held up in his manicured hand, his perfectly coiffed hair darkening one side of the glass, exuding the confidence of a man who couldn’t remember the last time he’d second-guessed himself. Then I had another flash of him being carried from Tampa Bay, his skin puffy and bleached white, his eyes closed, looking no older than fourteen.

“I loved Jay,” I said, and the moment the words left my mouth, I didn’t know why I’d said them. Maybe it was true. Or maybe, I was trying to see what Desiree’s reaction would be.

“So did I,” she said and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. “And he loved you. He said you were worthy of trust. That all sorts of people, from every walk of life, trusted you completely. That’s when he told me Cheswick Hartman worked pro bono for you.”

“So what do you want from me, Miss Stone?”

“Desiree,” she said. “Please.”

“Desiree,” I said.

“I want you to, I guess, watch my back tomorrow night. Julian should be with my father when he goes to One Federal, but just in case anything goes wrong.”

“You know how to bypass the alarm system?”

“Unless he’s changed it, and I doubt that. He’s not expecting me to try something this suicidal.”

“And these…heirlooms,” I said for lack of a better word, “they’re worth the risk?”

She leaned forward again, grasped her ankles in her hands. “My mother wrote a memoir shortly before she died. A memoir of her girlhood in Guatemala, stories about her mother and father, her brothers and sisters, a whole part of my family I never met and never heard about. The memoir ends the day my father came to town. There’s nothing in it of any great importance, but she gave it to me not long before she died. I hid it, and it’s become unbearable to think of it still lying in that house, waiting to be found. And if my father finds it, he’ll destroy it. And then the last piece of my mother that I have left will die, too.” She met my eyes. “Will you help me, Patrick?”

I thought of the mother. Inez. Bought at fourteen by a man who thought anything was for sale. And unfortunately, he was usually proven right. What kind of life had she had in that big house with that crazed megalomaniac?