Chapter 172: 172. This Could End Up Worse If He Tells The Truth, And Please Don’t Be Divorce

Gerald nodded slowly. He did not ask what Petricia had said, which told Mike something about where Gerald thought that conversation had gone.

"We talked about it years ago," Gerald said. "Before all of this..."

"What we really wanted... A real future..."

"Maybe expanding the building, maybe something else..."

"She had ideas... my sweet wife... Petricia... always has ideas." He exhaled. "And I had ideas too, then... That account was for when the ideas had room to happen."

"The account you used," Mike said.

Gerald said nothing, which was its own answer.

Mike was quiet. He looked at the street and let the silence sit for a moment before he brought it back.

"Gerald," he said. "Look at me."

Gerald looked at him.

"The Phoenix will be focused inward for the next few days."

"Something happened tonight that they’re going to need to figure out before they turn their attention back to external business."

"What happened with Big G...?" Gerald said. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

"They’ll find him," Mike said. "At some point..."

"And when they do, they’re going to have questions about what happened in that alley and what happened after, and Big G’s answers are going to create more questions." He paused. "That’s a window... even though it’s not a large one, but it’s real."

Gerald leaned forward slightly. "How much time?"

"Three days... Maybe five if their internal dynamic is as complicated as I think it is." Mike put his hands flat on the table. "I need you to understand something before I tell you what to do with those days."

"Okay," Gerald said.

"The Phoenix is not a problem I can solve for you."

"What happened tonight buys time... It does not resolve the debt, and it does not make them go away."

"The debt is still real, and at some point someone is going to come back to collect it."

"Then what do I do about it...?" Gerald said.

"First thing you have to do is fucking burn all those addictions by stopping going to that casino... I mean it completely, just fucking stop at this point," Mike exhaled. "Not that one, not any of the others in this district."

"You need to distance yourself from the environment that allows them to access you."

"And the debt...?"

"The debt is a separate problem... but the debt doesn’t get worse if you’re not there building it." Mike looked at him. "Can you do that part?"

"Yes," Gerald said, and it felt not like a promise but like the flat tone of someone who had arrived somewhere.

"Second thing," Mike said. "You tell Petricia about the WHOLE thing!"

Gerald’s face went through several developments in rapid succession. "I can’t—"

"Not tonight," Mike said. "Not tomorrow."

"But before the end of next week, you sit down with her and you tell her the actual version!" Mike said with a serious look. "This time... make sure it’s a different version... not the version where it’s just the casino and you got a bit carried away."

"The version involves an organized group that has been using you to gain leverage over the building she constructed."

"She’ll definitely leave me, which could lead to our divorce..." Gerald said, his tone reflecting the voice of someone who had been carrying that specific fear for a long time and rarely let it surface.

Mike looked at him for a moment.

"Maybe," he said. "But I want you to think about the other possibility that could happen to her."

"What other possibility...?"

"She’s been managing alone for five years," Mike said. "The building, the accounts, the tenants, the maintenance, everything."

"She’s been doing that because at some point she stopped expecting help from the person who was supposed to be in it with her! And she did it anyway!"

"She kept building something."

Gerald said nothing after hearing that because he was in shock.

"That’s not someone who leaves the first time she finds out things were harder than she knew," Mike said. "That’s someone who needs to know the truth so she can decide what she’s actually dealing with."

"Right now... she’s making decisions based on a version of this that’s missing the most important part."

"I have to be the one to tell her," Gerald said, and it’s not a question.

"She finds out from the Phoenix it’s over," Mike said. "She finds out from you; there’s at least something to work with."

"You can’t control which way that goes... but at the very least... you can control which version she hears first."

Gerald looked at the table. "You sound very certain about things you have no reason to be certain about."

"I’m certain about the Phoenix," Mike said. "I’m certain about what happens if you don’t tell her and they come back in six months with a different approach."

"The rest is yours to figure out."

Gerald was quiet for a long time. A taxi went past on the street, the only vehicle moving at this hour.

The coffee in his cup was going cold.

"I’ve made a mess," he said. "Wait no... I’ve fucked up big time."

"That’s true," Mike said.

"Of all of it... The money, the building, the marriage." He paused. "All the parts I was supposed to hold together..."

"Yes," Mike said.

"Is there—" He stopped but then started again. "Is there any version of this where it’s not irreparable...?"

Mike looked at him with the steadiness he brought to questions that deserved honest answers rather than comfortable ones.

"I don’t know," he said. "But the version where you stop making it worse is the one where you find out."

Gerald looked at his coffee for a moment. Then he picked up the coffee and drank it, despite it being cold, similar to how people drink cold coffee when they need something to do with their hands instead of doing nothing.

"Can I ask you something?" Gerald said.

"Go ahead."

"Why are you doing this?" He looked at Mike with the genuine uncertainty of someone who had run through the available reasons, and none of them had fit neatly. "You’ve been in the building for only a week..."

"You don’t know us, and... you have no stake in any of this."

Mike looked at the street for a moment.

"The building is my address," he said. "Anything that happens to the building occurs adjacent to me..."

"That’s one reason right there."

"And the other reason...?"

"Petricia built something real," Mike said. "And someone has been quietly using it as collateral on a debt she doesn’t know exists."

"That bothers me as a man... and you should feel ashamed of yourself because of that."

"It bothers you that much...?" Gerald said.

"Yes."

Gerald held his look. He was looking for the part that wasn’t being said, and Mike let him look, and what Gerald eventually arrived at was not the whole picture but enough of it to satisfy him.

"Thank you," Gerald said. "For tonight... Whatever you did really opened my mind and heart."

’Heart...? That sounded fucking gay... I’m about to slap him if he keeps sugarcoating it.’

"Don’t thank me yet," Mike said. "Just make sure you don’t go back to the casino."

"I won’t," Gerald said, his tone flat, indicating that he had made a decision rather than given a promise, which is typically more reliable.

They sat for a few more minutes without speaking. The street was quiet in the specific way of a commercial block at two in the morning, the lights still on in the pharmacy, a single lamp overhead making the table visible in an otherwise dim stretch of pavement.

Gerald paid for the coffees without asking. Mike let him.

Gerald and Mike walked the rest of the way to Harwick Lane together, and the walk was quiet, resembling the silence that often occurs between two people who have said most of what there is to say and have not yet reached the point of pretending otherwise.

At the building entrance Gerald stopped. He looked at the door and then at Mike.

"If she leaves," he said.

"If that really happens," Mike said, "then it will be a consequence of what you did, not of telling her about it."

Gerald looked at him for a moment. He nodded once, the nod of someone receiving the truth they had asked for and were not going to argue with.

He went inside.

Mike stood in the entrance for a moment and looked at the building and at the light still on in the management office window, and then he went up to the second floor.

"What a fucking dumbass... I can’t stop saying that every second talking or meeting that stupid-ass husband."

...

It was after midnight when he knocked on the management office door, which was the apartment that connected to the back of Petricia’s workspace, and she opened it with the expression of someone who had not been asleep.

She had changed out of the clothes she had been wearing when Gerald came home. She was in a cardigan now, dark gray, the kind she wore when she was not expecting to be seen but had put something on anyway because sitting in a house that felt unsettled in a bathrobe was worse.

Her reading glasses were on top of her head. She had clearly forgotten they were there.

"I know," she said when she saw his face.

"You know some of it," Mike said. "May I come in?"