Who: Neil and Gabe What: Drinks and discussing Chloe. Where: A bar. When: Let's go with recentish. Warnings/Rating: None?
Neil never seemed to make out very well when it came to the hotel and its shenanigans. Either he was hooking up with someone else, dying, or killing something; hell, sometimes he got the best of both worlds. But this had been a whole new level of crazy, and on top of everything else in his life he was now plagued by the worry that maybe the hotel knew something he didn’t. Maybe Norman had left some residual insanity behind, and it was only a matter of time before it reared its head out in the real world. Then, as if a potential violent breakdown wasn’t enough, there was still the problem of Chloe and her weird brother to consider. He’d never gotten too close with her family while they were dating; yeah, his parents had known her parents, but he wasn’t best friends with her siblings or anything. He vaguely remembered Alexander, but apparently he’d gone a little loopy himself in the intervening years with all this vampire bullshit, and that didn’t make him feel any better about rejecting a woman who liked to mess with his current girlfriend and had recently moved into his building. He must’ve been really blind back then, because he hadn’t realized just how manipulative Chloe could be until now.
So, needless to say, there were countless reasons for him to be drinking. And drinking with a guy who’d married into the Murphy clan seemed as good an idea as any, since he’d probably have some advice or something to offer. He’d gotten himself into one hell of a mess and he realized, belatedly, that he had no idea how to get himself out. He got to the bar a little early, because why waste any time, and he pointedly did not think about what Louis or anyone else would say. This wasn’t falling off the wagon, he was fine. He just needed to relax, needed something to take the edge off, and wasn’t he owed that? A little booze wouldn’t hurt.
Yeah, and he almost believed it. He ordered himself a beer while he waited, figuring he’d start off slow and go from there.
Gabriel could taste the smoke at the back of his throat, charred white ash and the soft wispy curls of cinders. He had come home in the early hours, grateful for the babysitter (who called herself a nanny and now stayed ‘occasionally’ in the guest room often enough that she was half-way to deserving the title) who had dealt with the Halloween affairs in his absence - notable was the candycorn now ground stickily into the carpet and Phee’s door firmly closed which was the sulkiest way she knew to communicate being mad he had not been present. Gabe was extremely glad she was not yet old enough to know how to sulk like the teenager she very much wished to be. It had been a not-unpleasant event; he remembered the last, screwing like a teenager in the anonymity and safety of curtained booths and this had been mild, uneventful in comparison.
But there was always eventfulness. Chloe. As he approached the bar whose name blinked at him from the tablet, black script on white screen, he thought of a tangle of dark hair, of eyes too sharp to be sweet, a cold and bored drawl that was both refined and grating and gratitude, thin and shifting quickly as if the young woman wished to distance herself from the resolution as well as the cult itself. Chloe who had become pure poison in the intervening years, after Christmases in a house so cold and damp he’d shivered the entire damn time and found a hide-out (and companion) in Dolores, talkative young thing that wasn’t yet inured to the chilly froideur and refined pronunciation that chased him along hallways and left him hopelessly lost. Chloe who had this guy Neil in her sights and was buying hotels like a grand game of Monopoly sketched out on an overlarge board.
Halloween had taken the edge off the usual concerns; the names floating out there, lost in the murk of black market buying. Gabriel did not take with him the gun locked in the cabinet in the study but the man who entered the bar, walking gingerly on an injury that felt like new, was cautious. He was tall and he was broad and the gray had threaded past his temples into his true hairline and mingled with the dark and he stood for a minute and observed, picking through the individuals at the bar with the thoughtless skill of years of practice. When he sat beside Neil, it was with a signal to the bartender, evidently for the measure of whiskey that was splashed into a glass and set in front of him.
Gabriel turned on the stool and held out a large, solid hand. “Neil, right?”
His first beer didn’t last long, and he was halfway through his second when the stool beside him became occupied. It hadn’t mattered before he left his suite that he didn’t know what Gabe looked like, and it hadn’t mattered once he’d gotten to the bar either; place like this, finding each other wouldn’t be difficult. Neil downed another gulp before turning his head, taking the proffered hand with one of those polite introductory smiles and gave it a firm, polite shake. “Yeah, that’s me. You must be Gabe.” The guy looked like he could take care of himself, that was for sure, but he didn’t look like he came from money and the Murphys were huge snobs; her parents probably hadn’t approved.
“So, did you go to that party thing too?” Handshake completed, he turned back to his beer and idly turned the bottle around.
Gabriel did not drink quickly nor with the easy enjoyment of a man simply off-duty. Alcohol blunted instinct, smothered the honed sensitivity of training to identify threat before it coalesced into something that actually presented a problem. He picked up the glass but he did not drink immediately, he rolled it in his grip from the ends of blunted fingers back through to his palm and studied it thoughtfully, inhaling the smoky tang of something that could afford to be expensive. And then he took a sip. The man on the stool with what was likely not the first beer sweating on the paper mat in front of him was not who he would have considered Chloe’s desire to look like. Dolores’s conviction that the brother and sister flirted and the disgust Chloe had expressed clearly enough for men who were too bulky and broad for delicate English houses and bone china had led him to believe the man he was looking for would be a typical academic; pale with rudimentary build, possibly glasses and predisposition toward quoting poetry.
Neil looked nothing like this initial impression. He took another swallow of good whiskey and thought it over. “Yes,” he said shortly. There was no further elaboration. No easy explanation; people fell into conversation casually because they enjoyed talking and because they lacked guard. Gabriel, with a name-sale at his back and intimate knowledge of the Murphys, had a guard more sure than anyone else in the place. “You didn’t run into her there, did you?” Mild alarm. The parties were prone to lack of inhibition, conscious thought cast off like clothes. He had a memory like salt on the back of his tongue of the last one, Chloe if picked up even without thought would find a reason to make it cling.
That one word was enough. Good things rarely happened at parties the hotel decided to force people into attending, and Neil wasn’t in the mood to discuss the specifics of the night either. “Lucky us,” he muttered, taking another sip of beer. He was certainly no academic, even if he’d been raised in wealth and prestige, but his parents hadn’t been very involved and that distance meant that he’d stopped caring about whether or not he was a disappointment somewhere along the line. What had likely attracted Chloe to him, he realized now, was his devotion to her, the way he’d followed her around like an infatuated puppy and been oblivious to how easily she could manipulate and wrap him around her finger. He’d thought the world of her in college, which was why her departure had crushed him. But he was older now, more jaded, and he didn’t look at her the same way.
He snorted when Gabe asked if he’d run into her there. “I don’t know. If it was her, though, I bet she wouldn’t be too thrilled to know it.” Murder didn’t exactly inspire warm and fuzziness.
There had been nothing in the party to merit ill-feeling. A conversation about women (Gabriel was beginning to think that male interests revolved around this, the bisection of gender and the impasse constructed when neither truly understood the other, nor could feasibly provide an explanation as to why not) that lingered like smoke clinging to fabric, resurrected sentiment put away. He had telephoned the hospital, enquired briefly and without emotion and put the phone down before saying goodnight to the children. “Death rather than sex,” Gabriel observed over the lip of his glass, swallowed hard against the mellowed burn of good whiskey and set the empty glass down on the napkin without signalling the bartender for another.
Things had a pattern. It was rudimentary interest, to observe that something as seemingly random (as vicious) as a hotel that lay on the outskirts of town, untouched by anything but copious amounts of dust could obligate itself to follow a pattern. You learned, when you were trying to find footing with a new target, a new job, to look for patterns. Patterns could be manipulated or avoided, but Gabriel didn’t yet know how to do either. It was enough to find one.
“The first thing to know about the Murphys,” he said, turning the glass on its black square of papery-damp napkin, “Is that they operate in a pack.”
“Yeah.” There was no point in denying it. Neil wasn’t proud, nor was he indifferent, but he wasn’t going to hide behind lies about the night before. He could own up to it. He could do that much, at least. “Not sure which is worse, to tell you the truth.” Both had lasting repercussions, especially when you were supposed to be in a relationship with someone. Sex didn’t go over too well in those circumstances, and claiming it didn’t mean anything just sounded like an empty excuse. But that was over and done with, and he tried not to look too hard into why the hotel did what it did or why he’d become what he had or, even, what it said about him.
He raised his eyebrows. “A pack?” That made them sound like a bunch of lions, but maybe that wasn’t far from the truth. “Her and her brother, Alexander, you mean?”
The bartender hovered. He had an air of positive expectation; the whiskey on the napkin was expensive, not top shelf but perhaps the second rung. The bartender looked like many of the people in the bar ordered a generic, American-brewed beer, served cold and poured into a glass and that he, the bartender, was filled with expertise that he could be drawn upon. Gabriel deliberately ignored him, and slid his left elbow down onto the bar-top, angling his shoulder toward Neil, effectively blocking the bartender from the conversation. His hopeful air died away.
“A pack,” Gabriel repeated with the clarity of accentless American, far too sober for the bar or the environment and quite possibly also too clean. “Never done death.” He gave it momentary consideration, the sort of sweeping notion better suited to ordering a la carte. “Her brother. Her parents. Her willingness to embroil the rest of the world into her troubles.” He looked at the man doing his best to sink what had to be his second, if not his third drink, thoughtfully.
“Once a decision is made, the Murphys don’t go back on it.”
Neil barely noticed the bartender; he had his own tastes, sometimes he went expensive and sometimes he went strong. Right now he just wanted a beer, and he didn’t need or want any outside advice, which why he was grateful for Gabe’s non-verbal shutout, a message for the guy behind the bar to move along elsewhere. “It sucks,” he said of death, shrugging. Which was true, but somehow it didn’t matter as much anymore. Maybe it had something to do with it not being real, or maybe he was starting to become accustomed to the hotel’s insanity and dying was so widespread that it just didn’t seem like something special anymore.
But the party wasn’t what was on his mind. It was there and gone, not like fucking Chloe and her crazy family. “Some pack,” he sighed, taking another swig of beer. Her parents had influence, money, power. Alexander, well, he was probably just as manipulative as the rest of them. He didn’t have his own parents on his side but he did have his brothers, and a sister, which had to count for something. “Look, I know Chloe’s locked onto me like one of those dogs, Rottweilers or whatever, but she has to lose interest eventually, doesn’t she? Find someone richer, more successful, something.” He felt like he was grasping at straws, but sooner or later Chloe would set her sights elsewhere; he couldn’t deal with this forever.
Gabriel’s smile was thin-lipped and it didn’t quite stretch beyond there. He had thought Neil, from what he had seen of the man, having trawled the forums for anything left open, entirely normal. A man far too rich to know much about wanting. What he recalled of Chloe was disjointed. It was fit together from the leftovers of Christmases he’d disliked intensely, a visit that Eloise returned from as brittle as china and as acidic as vinegar, and the recollection of a woman who had been extracted from what had been on paper, extremely unpleasant. “Chloe,” he said, choosing his words with care and a small swallow of the liquid in the glass, “Does not have to do anything.”
It was, from all observations, a way of living that Gabriel could not understand. To have everything that was needed, growing up, the kind of education unimpeded by the need for scholarships and grants, not to think about food or your next pair of sneakers. As an adult, she could do anything. But all the grand living in mausoleums with parents who conceded their check-book to any whim, perhaps that just narrowed the world down to what you wanted, and what you had.
“They don’t let things go. I married their sister ten years ago,” he tipped the glass in wry toast, “I’m still the American. If we hadn’t divorced they would still be lobbying for us to do so. Neither of them,” he did not include the woman presently locked up and drifting without an anchor; Lu had gone without enough to know what it was when you couldn’t have something, “Let go. Do you know Dolores?”
As hopeful as he was that Chloe would move on, that one sentence summed her up perfectly. Gabe was right; she didn’t have to do anything. She was wealthy and spoiled, so much more so than he had ever been, because whereas Neil and his siblings had gone their own ways and dismissed their parents’ high standards Chloe (and her siblings, he presumed) had always stuck to that path, as though they were minor royalty and the world should fall at their feet accordingly. Time and time again he’d tried to make it clear that he was with Sam, but the manipulation, which he finally recognized, continued. “She could do better,” he muttered, swirling his beer around in its bottle. And it was true; she could. She could have anyone, do anything. Why him?
He grimaced when he thought of how close he’d come to marrying Chloe. If she hadn’t left him, it would have been a possibility. “So, no letting things go. Right.” He finished off his beer, sighed, and followed suit in ordering something stronger. “No. Who’s Dolores?”
It was interesting, that one little phrase made to the bottom of a bottle. It summed the man opposite up neatly and tied up the assessment with string. She could do better; not Neil. He was thinking of Chloe, and of what she wanted, rather than what he himself wanted. Gabriel did not know many other men beyond work. His social circle was small out of necessity and from habit, so many years spent out of the country and he had never wanted much beyond Eloise and the kids when he did come home. The men he had known across the years made a lot of jokes about women and if they loved them, they did so quietly where they could, and if they worked with them had their asses cheerfully handed to them by women who worked harder than they did. He did not often see men who looked at it from their point of view.
“No letting things go,” he repeated, eyeing the bartender on his way back. Gabriel drank the way any man who’d been through basic training drank; like it didn’t matter how it came so long as it was wet. But Neil looked like a man trying to find an answer, and the drunker he got, the less likely it was that he would find it. Still. He was holding it fine and Gabriel held his tongue between his teeth.
“Dolores is their sister. Adopted. Night and day. She’ll be the one quoting pop culture I don’t understand,” Gabe signalled the bartender discreetly, and the glass in front of him refilled. “Only one who has a clue what spite they’re up to. And it is spite, you’ll expect. Sam, the girl who engages with Chloe,” he had nothing but a name and writing on a forum to go on, but the voice to the writing was young, young enough that he had eyed Neil once again, and distinctly female, “She’s your partner?” He used the old word, the word for men who were past dating and old enough for marriage and children and the lifelong attachment of commitments.
Oh, Neil wanted to be drunk, and while he hadn’t gotten there yet he could get there if he kept up the pace, but that small, logical part of him knew that drunkenness would only hinder him in this particular situation. There was no point in being too wasted to listen to what Gabe was trying to tell him. He’d be wasting his time, the other man’s time, and putting himself straight back at square one. So he drank, but he kept his wits about him too. As long as he wasn’t slurring his words, he was good. Just because he didn’t always keep within his limits didn’t mean that he didn’t know them.
“Adopted sister,” he repeated. Huh. Rich families were all alike, it seemed. “So she’s not like the rest of them? How far does that go?” Meaning, really, whether she was willing to help or not. Maybe she was still on their side regardless. The use of the word ‘partner’ threw him for a second, mostly because he and Sam had gone so long without labels that ‘boyfriend’ and girlfriend’ had only just materialized, and no one had referred to them as partners before. But he saw the sense in it; boyfriend/girlfriend was kind of juvenile and husband/wife didn’t apply to them. “Yeah, she’s my partner. You can imagine how well she and Chloe get on.”
Gabe had not been drunk many times. There was no call for it, the loss of control, giving over to the slippery burn of alcohol, a tide to drift off on. He had drunk carefully and grimly, the first night there had been a nanny, when he could relinquish responsibility for the children who slept deeply, fitfully under his roof and think selfishly of all he had let go rather than the little boy and little girl who had lost more. He was not going to do it now, and the glass in front of him was the last one. He swallowed, painted the wooded smoke of the whiskey over his tongue and set the glass down for the slower enjoyment than the race his drinking companion was engaged in.
“She’s got divided loyalties, they’re family.” Gabriel had no notion of what family truly was. He had an inkling, cultivated by a few years held at the center of a family ruthlessly normal, and of the surprising power of how it felt with the children. Dolores was laughing clumsiness and broken teacups, a voice in the quiet that was too loud; “But she gives a warning,” a faint, small smile. “She calls them the Lannisters.”
He thought of what he had seen, the back and forth, Chloe’s written words imagined as they would be voiced, cut-glass and clear with the same drawling refinement that Eloise had, and Sam’s own responses, blunter, less inclined to tangle up in words and phrases. “Like a house on fire,” Gabe said drily.
Neil nodded grimly. He understood the ties between families; he might not have been close to his parents, but he was extremely loyal to his siblings and would always have their backs. That didn’t mean, though, that he’d just stand by if one of them was trying to screw with someone else’s life. “I get that. Nice of her to give a warning, though,” he remarked dryly. the mention of Lannisters earned a quirk of his brow, one that came with a fair dose of confusion. “Who, or what, are the Lannisters?” He wasn’t all that well-versed in pop culture, and the only reason he knew a little about comic books was because he’d wanted to educate himself about Norman back when he’d had him in his head.
“Pretty much,” he sighed. He gazed down into his drink for a moment, frowning thoughtfully. “I can shrug it off. She can’t. It really gets to her, you know? Which is exactly what Chloe wants.”
Gabriel didn’t know pop culture well, if at all. He knew how it abutted his life, wove itself beyond the door but the door had remained shut for a long time, first with the name sale and then with the children until he had convinced himself that it was better that it remained so. He knew Dolores would have laughed, that she often laughed, at his not knowing, and he had briefly looked it up in passing, to see who they were. “Incestuous siblings,” Gabriel told the bottom of his glass, grimly. It wasn’t that it was impossible to think of Alex and Chloe that way, it was that it was entirely possible. He wondered fleetingly if Eloise would have been the same, had he been at home more often when she had been well, and abandoned the idea quicky.
“Some kind of TV show. You get used to Dolores.” Gabriel knew little about the way to deal with women. He was terrible, the way men who spent little time with them were terrible, and he had loved just the one enough to tolerate trying to learn. They had been dreadful together, but even so, Gabe thought perhaps any ex that drove a present partner to irritation was one that needed dealing with swiftly.
“The Murphys don’t tackle through the front,” Gabe said instead, thoughtfully. “They take advantage, weaknesses.” He looked at Neil’s glass, almost by happenstance.
That made Neil choke on his beer. “Incestuous siblings?” He raised his eyebrows in clear disbelief, hoping that the comparison didn’t quite extend that far. Because yeah, the Murphys were a lot of things, but he didn’t even want to think of them crossing that line. “It’s a joke or something, right?” He was hoping for a yes but had a distinct feeling that he wouldn’t get one. God, this family was more messed up than he’d ever realized. He didn’t comment on Dolores since he didn’t know her, but maybe getting to know her wasn’t such a bad idea; she could be a sympathetic ally.
“They play dirty, of course,” he muttered. It was luck, maybe, that he caught the way Gabe looked at his glass, intentional or not, and he winced inwardly at himself. Chloe knew about his weakness for alcohol. She knew Sam’s weaknesses, too. “She’s good at that. And then she puts on this-- this innocent act. I used to fall for it.” He shook his head bitterly. “Not anymore. Doesn’t do any good, though. I just-- I feel like if I retaliate, it’s gonna be this huge war and I don’t want that. I just want her to back off.”
“It’s a war,” Gabe agreed. He was almost done drinking, but he set the glass down like he had made the decision. Gabriel was not a man who drank often or even a lot. To drink a lot would be to concede a weakness, to drink often would be that the weakness had overcome him. Instead, he laid one palm flat on the edge of the bar and rotated slowly around. “I hope to God the incest is a joke, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They don’t think fair and they don’t play fair.” He thought Chloe hadn’t been innocent since puberty, since she’d passed through the point of acquiring wiles the way a kitten acquires claws.
“So shut her down. But it’ll take firmness.” And Gabriel wondered whether the man sat on the stool was one for firmness at all. Chloe was not a woman who backed off. She was teeth and nails to the very end and dead if she stopped at all. “How did you wind up with her at all?” He didn’t seem like Chloe’s type.
War wasn’t what he wanted. He wasn’t a soldier, and he wasn’t good at being vindictive the same way Chloe was. The one thing he had going for him was family; he had brothers who’d stand beside him, who cared about Sam too, even if his parents didn’t give a damn. Sam had friends, too, more than he did. Who did Chloe have? Her weird brother and nobody else. That had to count for something. “Great. Family vs family, like something out of a movie,” he sighed, downing the rest of his drink and shoving the glass away. He shook his head when the bartender asked if he wanted a refill; not now. It was hard enough to think as it was.
Shutting her down sounded easier said than done. “What if firmness doesn’t work? What if she just gets pissed that I’m sticking with Sam, and goes all bitter ex on my ass?” He was beginning to realize that Chloe was that type; if she couldn’t have him, she’d settle for making his and Sam’s lives a living hell. “I don’t think she’s used to not having what she wanted,” he added. Typical rich kid. As for how they’d gotten involved, he prefaced the explanation with a sigh. “We met in college. Both had rich families, similar backgrounds, and I fell for her hard. I guess she liked the way I followed her around like a puppy. Then she dumped my ass and ran off with a professor to join some cult.” He snorted and shook his head. “She leaves me, and now she’s mad I won’t take her back.”
Chloe was not a soldier, none of the Murphys were. A soldier, someone of the army, was clear cut and distinct, they knew what orders were and they took them. A soldier did not care, he only executed. Chloe was something curdled; she had been, Gabriel thought, nice enough, once. He watched the glass clatter over the bar with something like approval very small curling in the corners of his mouth. Good. The man might be a drunk - only someone who drank often and a lot could hold their liquor like that - but he was not an oblivious one.
“Someone has to teach her,” Gabriel raised a shoulder in a so-why-not salute, all casual disregard for the discomfort that came with it. There was a nonchalance, from a man who had loved a woman filled with unhappiness and spite for her unhappiness, in that. The family had ranged itself against him, china tea-cups and cut-glass voices, and disliked him for being firmly himself. Neil, a broad, large man did not seem difficult, did not seem stubborn. Perhaps that was why she’d been drawn to him.
“Yeah, you’ve made yourself unavailable for persuasion nor money,” Gabe said, calmly. “She’s madder than a wet cat.”
“Whoever tries to teach her that has their work cut out for her,” he remarked wryly. Neil couldn’t even try reaching her himself because he didn’t trust that anything she told him would be the truth. She’d lie, she’d manipulate, and she’d pass it off as honesty. He saw, now, how stupid he’d been for falling for her act in the past. She must’ve loved in, reeling him in time and time again while she gloated and tormented the woman he loved.
The guy was calm; maybe he should give that a shot. “Oh, well,” he sighed. “I’ll give ignoring her a shot. Make sure Sam doesn’t fall into her traps and hits her up on the journals. Pretending she doesn’t exist is worth a try, don’t you think?”
Gabriel did not think that Chloe would learn. He did not think Chloe could learn, like a wooden door, once warped and swollen with damp, would not close properly at all. But he said nothing of whether she could or would change. Lines could be drawn, nonetheless, and reinforced if Chloe did not follow them. But it was a long and arduous thing, and required acknowledging its difficulty. Neil did not seem like difficult was something he took to easily.
“Pretending she doesn’t exist will mean keeping on doing so, regardless of what she does to pull you in,” he said instead, calm as before. Gabriel thought of what could be done to him in practical terms; a bomb, a gun, a knife. He didn’t think of manipulation, perhaps because he had taken it as part of love for so very long. “You think your Sam can manage that?” He doubted it. From what he had seen, the girl was as volatile as Chloe, and unpredictable.
There was nothing Chloe could do to win him back. She could, and would, try, making his and Sam’s lives miserable in the process, but none of it would result in them getting back together. And Neil was usually easygoing but even he had his limits. There were lines which, if crossed, would push him over the edge. Chloe had family but so did he, and he had a feeling she grossly underestimated him. She wouldn’t expect him to fight back. Maybe he could use that to his advantage.. except that fighting back was the exact opposite of ignoring her, wasn’t it? That wouldn’t be easy.
“No,” he admitted. “I might be able to, but not Sam. I’m not sure about my siblings either.” He sighed. “Would fighting back, showing her she can’t just push me around, be a bad idea?”
Gabriel thought about it. He knew fighting back. He knew sitting on the uncomfortable couch with a glass of whiskey when everyone else was drinking tea, with a cold draft down the back of his neck and lazily slanting words back across when they came hard and fast. He remembered Eloise’s hand tense-tight on his, and the way her chin jutted when she was good and mad at him for arguing. He knew Chloe laughing, Christmas-bright with scorn and Alexander darkly malhumored as his parents. Fighting back, all it did was show Chloe she’d got something and she was more concerned with that than anything else.
“Probably,” he admitted. It was more than likely it would be taken any way Chloe wished to think about it. It was a difficult situation, one where Gabe was grateful he’d been hated from the beginning. “Your girl, can you get her to keep quiet? Maybe freezing them out works, hell, I’ve never seen it tried.”
Probably wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear, but it had been what he was expecting. With the way Louis had been acting lately he wasn’t so sure not fighting back was possible, and it was tempting to play her game, to sink low and hit her where it’d hurt to finally get her out of their lives for good. But there would be retaliation, he knew that, and Neil sighed.
“I can try,” he admitted. “Sam’s stubborn, but getting worked up hasn’t worked so far. Maybe I can make her see that.”
Gabriel slid off the seat, and he folded a couple of good bills underneath the edge of the empty whiskey glass. It was time to relieve the sitter and time to go home and look at both of his kids and be grateful that he’d had the one Murphy who wasn’t malicious when crazy, just crazy. He’d drunk more than he’d meant to and he’d liked the guy enough but Chloe was difficult enough if she didn’t center her sights on making misery where she could. He slid a card from his wallet and spun it on a finger across the bar to Neil. It was a nondescript and utterly uninformative thing, merely stating his name in raised black type and ‘consultant’ beneath it, with a phone number and email address. It was, Gabe had found, a great deal easier to have some kind of cover when you stayed in the country longer than two weeks at a time.
“If she makes trouble and you need real help,” he said, leaving the card in between them, and he nodded toward it. “Or you can raise me on the journals.” A small, rueful smile, “I can’t promise to be able to fix it. But if I hear of anything outrageous, I’ll let you know.” He stood then, leaned hard on the cane, and raised his hand in mocking salute.
Neil hadn’t expected a magical answer to his problems; it was just nice talking to someone who understood. Gabe knew the family, and nothing surprised him. He was calm, not prone to impulse or flying off the handle, and that was nice too. Drinking was over for the night, and he watched the card make its way over curiously before reaching for it and tucking it into his pocket. “Thanks,” he said, though he didn’t know how much help anyone could really be. Still, Gabe was someone he didn’t have to worry about burdening with bad news, not like he worried when it came to his family. “I’ll be in touch.” He mirrored the other man’s mock salute but didn’t leave, not yet. He was done with booze but he wanted to think a little first before heading home.