“Call Ma over,” Angie said. “I don’t want to have to tell the story twice.”

He leaned toward her, talking out of the side of his mouth while he scanned the restaurant. “Go on, give me a hint. I’ll keep it a secret from her as long as you want. You got a job?”

“Yup,” Angie said, examining a forkful of chicken. “That’s it. Gotta go see the lawyer about the contract, go make copies, stop at the post office. So I’ll come back later and give you all the details, how’s that?”

He was eyeing her now suspiciously. “You going to see that Edsel guy?”

“Ford, Dad. His name is Ford.”

Her father waved a hand. “Ford, Edsel, Chevrolet. What I want to know is, who names a kid after a car?”

Angie’s mother slid into the booth next to him, nudged him with an elbow. “Rich people with no taste name their kids all kind a crazy things. But he’s a good boy, Tommy, leave him be. Angeline, did you even look in the mirror this morning? And you got gravy on your chin. Here, let me.” She leaned across the table.

“Fran, the kids got new work,” Tommy said as his wife and daughter wrangled over the napkin.

“Nice job keeping that secret,” Angie said, grinning in spite of herself. “Gotta go.”

At heart, Hoboken was a small town. There might be a tumbling stream of stockbrokers, artists, and nostalgia buffs who settled for a year and then moved along, but for the most part Hoboken was still the same place it had been before the money showed up with the bulldozers and the renovation bug. Angie had grown up here, gone to college across the river in Manhattan, and come back again. She had never lived anywhere else. She knew everybody, everybody knew her.

She couldn’t wait to get away, and the key to that was in the contract tucked under her arm.

John Grant. John Ogilvie Grant, to be precise. She had asked him once why he bothered to sign all three names and he had looked at her with those blue eyes and told her: he had made a promise to his grandmother.

And that was secret of his success. John’s particular talent was dealing with people by giving in on the points that didn’t really matter to him and negotiating his way on the important stuff. Southern charm with a veneer that came from old Manhattan money and the Ivy League. Tall, broad of shoulder, sandy brown hair, big hands, deep voice, deeper laugh. Deadly.