The Boss's Enemy

Nathan Cross has been at his desk since five-thirty, the Bryant Park account open in front of him, his father's portrait turned face-down against the wall. His sister Lila comes in without knocking, sets down a latte, and offers him a safe candidate for the brand consultant job. Then she produces a second sheet and holds onto the edge of it. *"The name is Diego Navarro."* The resume is excellent. Columbia MBA, freelance for the last eighteen months, a client list that would quiet the board. The surname is the problem. Marco Navarro is the man who sat across from Nathan at his father's funeral wearing Samuel Cross's gold watch. Diego takes the account. He is a single father whose son Leo is five and just started kindergarten, he has rent and a custody arrangement to protect, and his friend Oscar has already hacked the lobby cameras to tell him what he is walking into. *Oscar: That man hates you already. What did you do?* Neither of them says the other thing. Six months ago, at a bar on Bleecker, Nathan let a stranger buy him a drink and touch his wrist. Diego remembers the elevator and the hallway and then nothing: *"I woke up on the floor of your room with blood on my hands and your wallet in my pocket."* There is a cut on his arm that matches a scar on Nathan's. Neither man knows what happened in between. Samuel Cross left behind a file. Lila found it in their father's safe after he died, thick with the evidence he was gathering against Marco Navarro, and Nathan has never opened it. Marco knows it exists, and Marco wants his son to bring it to him. When Diego will not, the leverage arrives through the mail slot on a Tuesday evening: a petition for modification of custody, filed by Leo's mother through a firm called Goldstein and Reyes, citing undue influence from a known felon. Marco does not make threats he does not intend to keep. So Nathan has a choice about the file he would rather leave closed, and Diego has a choice about whether to tell the man he works for the worst version of the truth, and both of them have a hearing coming. Lila starts making calls to find a lawyer who wins this kind of case quietly. This is a workplace MM romance about two sons stuck inside their fathers' war, one missing night neither of them can account for, and a small boy whose future is being used as collateral. It ends on a scaffold on Atlantic Avenue with three sets of initials painted under a tree. The heat is closed-door.