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Nathaniel would have to feel responsible for. He was sitting down to review his contract with Edward before the door behind Mrs. Magill was even closed.
     
    “THIS IS THE START OF SOMETHING GREAT, NATHANIEL.”
    Three hours after Audrey Magill left his office, Nathaniel welcomed Edward Dryden into it. They’d gone over every clause in their contract together, had discussed the development in detail, had reviewed and approved all the arrangements left to make. All that was left was to sign on the dotted line—in triplicate—and the deal would be done. Edward signed his name where indicated with a narrow, crowded hand, then offered the pen to Nathaniel. He bent over the desk and placed the pen to paper and was about to scrawl the first of three signatures when his hand stilled. Because something Audrey Magill had said during her long spiel suddenly erupted in his brain.
    If you sign this contract with Edward Dryden, you’re going to lose your soul forever.
    That was supposedly the gist of what his great-great-blah-blah-blah grandfather had told her, what the late, great Captain Silas Summerfield had come from the grave to say. That if Nathaniel went through with what would undoubtedly be the most financially rewarding deal of his career, he would be left soulless.
    Nathaniel didn’t even know if he had an ancestor named Silas Summerfield. He knew little about his family on either side, mostly because he didn’t care. His mother had been estranged from her family, so he’d never met anyone from the maternal side of his family tree. His father had died when Nathaniel was too young to remember him, leaving his mother to struggle to provide for the two of them the whole time he was growing up. He wasn’t big on heredity or genealogy, having never had much of a family to rely on. He knew there were other Summerfields out there—there must be, somewhere—but he’d never given any of them much thought. Present or past. And now suddenly, some strange woman—in more ways than one—had come barging into his life because of some dream she’d had about a long-dead relative.
    He told himself she was crazy. She must be. One of those people who weren’t content to go through life believing in things they had no business believing in to begin with, but who then had to foist off those bizarre beliefs onto others. They were people whose lives were so empty, and who needed attention so badly, that they had to harass other people to get it. True, Audrey Magill hadn’t looked like that kind of person. She’d seemed normal enough. But sometimes it was the most normal-seeming ones who were the ones you had to watch most closely.
    This deal with Edward was the start of great things. The sort of opportunity that only came along once in a man’s career. So what if the land Dryden Properties was developing was originally targeted for quality, low-income housing that would have enabled struggling, single-parent families—families like, oh, say, Nathaniel’s had been as a child—to live better lives? So what if, instead of safe homes for underprivileged kids, a new school to educate them, and a daycare to watch after them while their mothers worked, Edward was going to build overpriced lofts and boutiques for people who had more dollars than sense? That wasn’t Nathaniel’s problem. He wasn’t the world’s moral compass. He was just a guy trying to make a buck.
    And this deal would make him a mountain of those.
    “Having second thoughts, Nathaniel?”
    He glanced up at the question to see Edward smiling at him, but there was something in the smile that wasn’t quite genuine. As if the man honestly feared Nathaniel was about to change his mind. As if, should Nathaniel do that, there might be consequences. Consequences beyond the financial ones outlined in the contract.
    Nathaniel shook the feeling off. Edward Dryden just wasn’t much of a smiler, that was all.
    “Of course not,” he said as he dragged the pen across the line,