I shake my head. “No, we checked—”
“Ealey lied to you, son, or he just plain forgot because it was a handshake agreement done twenty years ago.”
“If it wasn’t disclosed—”
“I don’t care about fucking disclosure right now,” Valdman says. “I care about the fucking newspapers breathing down my neck.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I still don’t understand why the press would care about some random tenants—”
“Nuns, Sean,” Valdman interrupts. “They’re fucking nuns.”
Of all the things he could have said, the word nuns was probably the farthest down on my list of possibilities and I’m still asking myself if I heard him right when he continues. “They run a shelter and soup kitchen there, and in the last year, they’ve used it as a place to put up victims of human trafficking.”
Nuns. Shelter.
Human trafficking victims.
I blink.
And blink.
Because.
This is bad.
“Good old Ernest Ealey couldn’t sell those buildings for years, so he rented them out to the nuns for one dollar a year to get the tax write-off.”
“One dollar a year,” I echo.
Shit, this is so bad.
Valdman appraises me shrewdly over a sip of scotch. “I see you’re finally grasping the extent of the fucking problem.”
Oh, I am, and here it is: it doesn’t matter how legal and aboveboard the actual deal is now. Because the story is that an out-of-state developer is kicking a group of sweet, do-gooding nuns out of the place they do good from. The story is that a place of charity will be torn down and turned into a temple of consumerism and greed. The story is that these tiny old nuns—fuck, I can see them on the news now, with little wimples and adorable wrinkled faces—just want to feed and clothe the poor, and the big, bad millionaires are punishing them and the city’s needy just to make a quick buck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. How did I fucking miss this?
I run a hand through my hair and pull for a minute, using the pain to focus. “Do you want me to find a way to cancel the deal?”
“Fuck no,” Valdman scoffs. “Do you know how much money we’re making from it?”
Of course I fucking do, but I don’t say that.
My boss leans forward, tapping the top of his desk for emphasis. “No, it’s in Keegan’s and Ealey’s best interest to move forward, not to mention ours. Keep the deal, but fix this. Fix our image.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me,” he rumbles. “The PR is the real problem, not the deal, so you fix the PR.”
“I—” I actually don’t know what to say. “Sir, I don’t know shit about PR.”
“No, but you inked the deal, so it’s best if you’re the one the press sees. Plus you aren’t half bad-looking, kid. Makes the rest of us look good.”
I’m already shaking my head. “Sir, please—”
“It’s done, Sean. I’ve already had Trent reach out to the nuns—”
“You what?”
“And they were going to send their boss or whatever to meet you, but I guess one of the sisters is sick, so they’re sending a nun intern to meet with you.”
“A nun intern?”
Valdman looks impatient. “You know, like she’s not a nun yet, but she’s a nun-in-training or something. I don’t know—you’re the one with the priest brother, right?”
“Postulant,” I say, surprised I still know the word. “She must be a postulant.” And then I add, “And he’s not a priest anymore.”
His brow furrows. “But that must mean your whole family is Catholic, right? That you’re Catholic?”
“They used to be, and I haven’t been Catholic since college,” I say, and something in the tone of my voice makes Valdman shut up about it.
“Ah, okay. Well, anyway, the training nun offered to come here, but I think you better go to her. Makes for a better first impression. She’s expecting you around ten at the shelter.”
I glance at the clock. Thirty minutes from now I’m going to be shaking hands with a nun. What the fuck happened to my day? “What’s the postulant’s name?” I ask as I stand. Might as well go in having as much information as possible.
Valdman glances at his computer screen. “Um, it’s Iverson.”
My blood jumps up a degree in temperature.
Chill out, Sean. There’s probably lots of Catholics with the last name Iverson in Kansas City.
Valdman squints at whatever notes Trent the Secretary left him in the call memo. “Zenobia,” he pronounces. “Zenobia Iverson.”
“Zenny,” I correct automatically.
Valdman looks up at me. “Pardon?”
I smooth down my jacket and grab my briefcase. My blood is hot with something between anxiety and relief. “It’s Zenny. She hates the name Zenobia.”
“Do you…do you know this training nun?”
“Postulant. And yes, I do.”
“Well, I don’t know how well she knows you. She was the one who leaked the story to the press yesterday—with your name attached.”
This does nothing to settle my pulse. “Oh.”
Valdman tilts his head at me. “How do you know her again?”
I answer as I’m walking out of the door. “She’s my best friend’s little sister.”
“Careful, son,” he calls after me. “Remember the deal comes first.”
As if I’d have any trouble remembering that. I give him a wave as I round the corner into the hall, check my phone to make sure I haven’t missed any calls from the hospital, and then head down to meet Elijah’s little sister and cajole her into calling off the press dogs.
Easy peasy, right?
Chapter 4
Okay, not so easy peasy. As I get into my car, my brain starts peeling everything apart, and I have to stop thinking about Keegan and PR for a moment so I can just…process.
Little Zenny-bug is a nun?
Little Zenny-bug is a nun who reported my financial firm to the press?
My mind is in a tumult as I navigate my Audi to the Keegan property to meet with Zenny. Zenny the postulant. Zenny the soon-to-be nun. I call Elijah, and it goes to his voicemail, so I toss the phone into my passenger seat with a huff, trying to remember if he’d said anything about his sister joining a religious order.
With some chagrin, I realize we don’t talk about our families much; an unspoken mutual thing, so as not to bring up anything that evokes the Great Iverson-Bell Schism of 2003. I didn’t even tell him Mom was sick until after he found out about it from his dad.
And it’s never bothered me that we don’t talk about family, but Zenny becoming a nun seems like something I should have known, at least for Elijah’s sake. His parents had been decently kind and understanding when he came out, although I knew he’d faced an unvoiced wall of Catholic discomfort about him being gay. The one thing his parents did voice was a desire for grandchildren of their bodies. Elijah hadn’t let it bother him—or maybe he simply hadn’t shown that it bothered him, I don’t know, we weren’t always great at talking about that kind of shit—but part of what had appeased his parents was knowing that Zenny might still give them grandchildren.