A nattily dressed tailor took Liam’s measurements for the custom suits, but Gwen bought him a ready-made suit as well. It lacked the sharp tailoring the others would have, but Liam needed to become accustomed to wearing a vest, tie, and starched collar as soon as possible. He had never worn a tie in his life, and Patrick had to show him how to knot it.
“It feels like a noose,” Liam groused once it was tied. “It’s too tight and it doesn’t fit.”
The tailor cleared his throat. “It fits perfectly, sir.”
“You’ll get used to it,” she assured him, then looked at Patrick. “You need a new suit too.”
Patrick blanched at the suggestion. “I just bought a new suit last month.”
She’d seen that suit in the courtroom, and it was completely inadequate. The tailoring was rudimentary, and the cheap wool lacked the drape a quality suit should have. She scrambled for the softest way to make her point. “It’s fine for daily wear, but if you ever meet with the board of Blackstone Bank, it’s not up to snuff.” She glanced at the haberdasher. “Please take Patrick’s measurements for a top-of-the-line suit as well.”
Patrick looked like he’d rather have a tooth pulled, but he submitted to the measurements. When she tried to add the suit to her bill, he rebelled.
“I can pay for my own suit,” he said, but she overruled him. After all, she was the one who’d put him in a situation where he’d be meeting with Wall Street executives, so it was only right she foot the bill.
Liam wore his new suit out of the shop, and they headed to a custom shoemaker, where Gwen had Liam fitted for two black oxfords, a pair of brown derby shoes, and dress boots. The shoemaker brought out a pair of ready-made cordovan leather wingtips that already fit him perfectly. The classic leather shoes had a contoured sole with padding sewn into the footbed. At last she’d found something Liam wholeheartedly approved of.
“I’m never taking these off,” he said in wonder. “These things are comfortable enough to wear to bed.”
He tossed his shabby work boots into the trash before heading on to their last stop, a barbershop, to get Liam a haircut and a proper shave. Women weren’t welcome in the barbershop, so she stepped outside to wait for them. It was a relief to get away from Liam’s bawdy humor and relentless criticism of her. She bought a pretzel to feed the pigeons and tried to count her blessings.
Twenty minutes later, Liam and Patrick emerged from the barber. Gwen turned away from the pigeons to assess the results, and her heart nearly stopped.
With his new clothes and neatly groomed hair, Liam looked so much like her father that a bittersweet ache bloomed in her chest. What sort of man would Liam have become if Mick Malone hadn’t snatched him as a child and turned him into a barbarian? If Crocket Malone hadn’t raised him to be full of bile and resentment? What happened to Liam wasn’t fair, and she needed to be more patient with his boorishness. No matter what it took, she would honor her father’s memory by ensuring that Liam had a decent shot at the world.
The friendship Patrick had formed with Liam didn’t preclude him from occasionally wanting to strangle the man, and it was entirely because of the atrocious way Liam treated Gwen.
They’d been on the Queens campus for almost a week, during which Gwen was consistently patient and compassionate toward her brother, yet Liam went out of his way to goad her, constantly needling her or rolling his eyes when she tried to help him.
His behavior baffled Gwen, but Patrick understood. Liam’s pride was stung as he was forced to shed every aspect of his former life like an old snakeskin while trying to ape the manners of a world he held in contempt—but one that also secretly intimidated him.
With each of Liam’s digs, Gwen wilted a little more. During Patrick’s long afternoons tutoring Liam on business and investments, Gwen scrambled to find an excuse to escape the tension indoors and had decided to breathe new life into the scraggly horse pasture alongside the stable. Leave it to Gwen to see a patch of land and want to beautify it. She’d gone to a hardware store to buy supplies, and now she hoed, weeded, and worked on resurrecting the patch of Kentucky bluegrass.
Liam behaved differently whenever Gwen left the room. He was hungry for information and latched on to everything Patrick could teach him. The first order of business was to improve Liam’s ability to read. He had dropped out of school twenty years ago and hadn’t looked at a book since. At first Liam couldn’t read more than a line or two, but he got better with practice. They put the financial section of the daily newspaper on the table before them, and Patrick read a sentence aloud while Liam’s eyes followed along each line of text. Then Liam had to read the same sentence with Patrick ready to help.
Liam’s ability to read came back quickly, but he could barely write. Patrick asked him to write a short summary of each article they read. Liam’s spelling was an embarrassment and his handwriting was atrocious, but he never tired. No matter how long they practiced, Liam was eager to learn and peppered Patrick with questions about contracts, interest rates, and investments.
Then Gwen returned, and Liam was once again contentious and difficult. A perfect example was the day it was too rainy to work outdoors, so Gwen settled in with an embroidery hoop while Patrick taught Liam the difference between a stock and a commodity.
“Stocks are shares in a specific company, but commodities are raw goods like wheat, corn, or copper,” he explained. “Depending on the supply of the commodities, the price rises or falls.”
Liam jabbed a finger at the headline. “People are celebrating the lousy wheat harvest. It’s coldhearted.”
“It’s not that they’re celebrating, but the price of wheat is going up because of the floods in the Midwest. That means people who invested in wheat futures will—”
“Will get rich off hungry people,” Liam said and glared at Gwen. “Do you people profit off these high-flying wheat prices?”
Gwen remained calm. “And by ‘you people’ are you referring to our family?”
“Your family,” Liam said. “Your family lives in a palace and gets rich while everyone else is paying inflated prices for bread.”
“Knock it off, Liam,” Patrick warned. “Gwen and I are trying to cram enough business insight into your head so that Frederick Blackstone will assign your father’s voting shares back to you. That’s your best shot to help the working people of this country.”
He didn’t need to ask a second time. Liam straightened and went back to painfully writing out his summary of the article, and Gwen sent Patrick a look of gratitude.
Thank you, she silently mouthed, and he beamed back at her. As much as he resented being torn away from home to play peacemaker between these two, Gwen needed his help, and that meant the world to him.
25
It had been a difficult two weeks, and Gwen spent most of it working in the pasture. She had already pulled out the pigweed and nutsedge, but the overgrazed patches of land needed heavy raking to break up the clods before she could amend the soil and scatter new seed.
“Why don’t you hire someone to do that?” Liam called out from the porch swing set up beneath the eaves of the building. The oppressive heat had driven Liam and Patrick to have their study session outside, and Liam continually nitpicked at her efforts to restore the pasture.