The Darkest Evening of the Year

in the girl’s life. How would that work?”
    “Last thing I want is in your miserable life, Bry, and I’ve had what fun there was to have with the little freak, I don’t want to be in her life anymore, either. The trust needs two directors to start, to sign the documents, then those two can appoint a third later. You will be one director, Bry, and the Redwing bitch can be the other.”
    He did not trust himself to speak.
    After a silence, she let out that throaty, deceptively normal laugh. “I told you my guy covers his ass. He didn’t even want to make a deal with you till he knew all about you. He didn’t want to set up a trust fund, give you the girl, then it turns out you fondled some six-year-old on a playground. Bad publicity is cancer to him.”
    “He invaded my privacy, turned loose private detectives on me, something like that?”
    “Get the holier-than-thou tone out of your voice, Bry. You’re getting what you wanted, so you have to eat some dirt. Knowing what used to get your juices flowing, I have to say I’m surprised you’re with Amy. Yeah, she’s cute in a Sandra Bullock tomboy kind of way, but are you sure that she’s sure about her gender?”
    “You leave her out of this.”
    “Can’t leave her out of it, Bry. If we’re going to do this deal, my guy wants it done right away. You need two directors of the trust. And from what I know about your life—which is mostly everything—Miss Amy is the only candidate. Considering you used to bang anything with a sufficient bra size, she must be witchy, cast a monogamy spell on you. Is she ever going to accept your proposal? She doesn’t need to marry you to be a director of the trust. I’m just curious.”
    He had put himself in this position by his actions as a young man, as he had put Hope where she was now. Actions have consequences. Vanessa was right: He had to eat dirt now, as much as she wanted to feed to him.
    “You hate me, don’t you?” she asked.
    “No.”
    “Come on, Bry. For this to work, I have to trust you.”
    “You enrage me sometimes. You scare me. But I don’t hate you.”
    “Bry, I’ve been blunt with you. I told you, years ago I wanted you dead. I still hate you. If you don’t hate me, something’s wrong with your head.”
    He took a deep breath. “All right. I hate you. Why shouldn’t I? But it doesn’t matter if we get this done. Let’s get it done. When do we meet? Where are you?”
    “Here’s the problem. For years I’ve been knocking around with our fat-faced little mutant, hooking up with one guy or another who knows how to take care of business, none of them the caliber of what I have now, and every damn time it gets half good, some child-welfare bitch shows up, she’s heard about Piggy not being in school and not being treated like the princess of the galaxy, and I have to quick move on, get new ID, find someone new to shack up with.”
    Given what Hope must have endured, Brian wondered if he would ever be able to redeem himself.
    He said, “Sorry to hear about the inconvenience. But what does it have to do with now?”
    “So say I give you the address and we make an appointment all businesslike, and you show up with a pack of child-welfare bitches.”
    “I wouldn’t do that. Why would I do that?”
    “To embarrass Mr. Deep Pockets, to ruin things between me and him, to get your little freak back without me getting what I want.”
    “I wouldn’t risk it,” he protested. “There’s no guarantee they’d give the girl to me. The deal you’ve laid out is good. I don’t hate you enough to risk the deal.”
    “Here’s what I’d be risking, Bry. Not just all the money I’ll ever need. If some child-welfare bitch gets a chance to ask Piggy how does her mommy take care of her, Piggy won’t lie. She’ll fumble out the truth in her own stupid way, and those bitches won’t think what I did with her was as much fun as I thought it was.”
    He dared not ask for details of the cruelties that she had visited upon their daughter. For the first time, Brian realized that, if he were privy to all the facts, he might be driven to kill this woman. An hour ago, he would have thought that he didn’t have the capacity for homicide. Now he was not so sure of that.
    “So how do we do this?” he asked.
    “You and Miss Amy come to us in baby steps. You don’t know the last step, the address, until right before we meet.”
    “And each step of the way, I figure we’re being watched.”
    She said,