Necessary Restorations (The Walsh Series) (A)
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Authors: Kate Canterbary
Tags: #The Walsh Series—Book Three
Necessary Restorations
Copyright © 2015 Kate Canterbary
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark(s).
Editing provided by Julia Ganis of JuliaEdits.
http//www.juliaedits.com/
Cover photographed and designed by Sara Eirew of Sara Eirew Photography.
http://www.saraeirew.com
Interior formatting and design provided by Stacey Blake of Champagne Formats.
http://thewineyreader.com/champagneformats/
I NEVER THOUGHT I’d die in an elevator.
I always figured it would have something to do with my brother Riley leaving the gas stove on all night, killing us softly in our sleep.
Or gin. Chances were good that my liver was well on its way to pickled.
Or doorknobs. Touching those things was like licking the goddamn plague.
But this day was headed for the fires of hell, and it was all Shannon’s fault.
“Hi, you’ve reached Shannon Walsh. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you soon.”
Fucking voicemail. Again.
“I don’t know where the fuck you are, Shan, but I’ve been waiting at the Commonwealth Avenue property for a goddamn hour. I thought we were trying to make a cash offer today, but I can’t very well do that without you here.”
Ending the call, I wet my lips and wiped the sweat from my brow. This heat wave was in its ninth day, and if I had even a lick of common sense, I would have hitched a ride to Cape Cod with my brother Matt and his wife Lauren for Labor Day weekend.
But no, I wanted to see the unit that just came available in the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old French Revival hotel-turned-condo building in Boston’s Back Bay. Specifically, I wanted my sister Shannon—the one who held the firm’s purse strings—to buy that unit. I wanted to spend the long weekend drafting plans to demo it down to the studs and then restore the unit to its original beauty. I wanted to lose myself in lines and materials, things I could control.
And I wasn’t up for third-wheeling it with the newlyweds.
I also wanted to be alone.
I could handle industry crowds and clients any day of the week and twice on Sundays, and I did it so fucking well they were willing to drop unreasonable amounts of money for my services. I was beginning to think I could finger-paint my designs and still collect six-figure commissions.
But I hated small talk. Bullshit conversations about weather or sports or politics held no appeal for me. I mostly stared at tits and asses until I was getting head in a coatroom or a drink thrown in my face.
And I was in a strange place these days. It was an odd in-betweenness; I wasn’t sick but I certainly wasn’t well. Not suicidal, but far from happy.
I’d been sliding further into this rut for months, and letting my work keep me too busy to notice. But while I was restoring everything I could get my hands on, the bottom was falling out on me. It was gradual, an evolution too small to notice without stepping back and examining from a distance. It was better this way. I didn’t want anyone noticing.
So I was flying solo this Labor Day.
To me, alone didn’t mean hunching over my drafting table all night, or skulking around the ancient Fort Point firehouse I called home.
No, alone meant drinking myself numb while some nameless young thing sucked the stress right out of me. There was nothing one hundred dollars pressed into the palm of the right maître d’ and a good cocksucking couldn’t soothe.
But let’s be clear: blowjobs didn’t
solve
problems.
If we were talking solutions, we were talking about my dick in someone’s ass, and I didn’t have the enthusiasm for that right now.
I needed a steady stream of gin, a blonde who knew her place was on her knees, and an otherwise interruption-free evening.
Go ahead: call me a manwhore.
Slut.
Player.
For all the disgust packed into those words, they were always tied with a fine, shiny thread of admiration. I did what everyone else wished they could, and I made it look good.
And I’d heard far worse. Someone always had some name to call me, and some of those names were hard to shake. For the better part of this year, I’d been replaying my last conversation with my father. The record was stuck on repeat in my mind, scratching and skipping back to the raw, awful parts.
My younger brother, Riley, had been leading a walk-through at a property in Bunker Hill—a string of decent row houses that my miserable bastard of a father, Angus, bought and dumped on us to restore—with Patrick, Matt, and me.
We were almost finished when Angus showed up, and I knew the minute he walked through the door that he was drunk. He’d been various shades of drunk since my mother died, and that day, he was cruel drunk.
And that was the day I refused to ignore his bullshit. I didn’t want to walk away that time. It wasn’t rolling off my back. I’d absorbed decades of his hatred, and that tank was long since overflowing.
He attacked everything that I was—my sexuality, my work, my relationship with my mother and my sister, Shannon—and told me I was a mistake. That I was too fucked-up to be alive. That I shouldn’t have been born.
That was Angus’s gift. He could hear every dark, twisted thought I had, and he knew how to sharpen them into daggers. Ten months later, I couldn’t stop hearing those words.
I walked through the unit one last time, photographing what was left of the original design elements and noting restoration ideas. In the hallway joining the twin penthouse units, I texted Shannon to reiterate my annoyance. Then I hit up the manager at the new whiskey bar in the South End to reserve my preferred booth.
