The End Game Read Online Free PDF

years ago.
    I’d also missed out on most of my own son’s young life, given that his mom—someone I had a brief, but intense, fling with a few years ago—had neglected to tell me about him until she and I had reconnected last summer. Not exactly your classic Hallmark family, but these days, I guess, few families are.
    Kim was a great girl, more a fine testimony to Tess’s single-parenting skills than to anything I had contributed since we’d all started living together. She and I got along really well. Much like her mom, she was impossibly headstrong and as sharp as The Bride’s samurai blade, by turns delighting us with her growing independence and infuriating us with her dismissal of entirely reasonable boundaries. After the mortal risks I’d seen her mother take, survive, then thrive upon, I really shouldn’t have been at all surprised. I even liked her boyfriend, Giorgio, a year older than her and a junior who already had Yale in his sights, despite their current sub-seven-percent admission rate. I’d once pictured myself pulling the Bad Boys routine on my daughter’s boyfriend’s ass, shotgun, wife-beater, and bottle of whiskey included, but the darned kid, clever and yet cool and sporty, had cruelly deprived me of any such pleasure.
    Alex, on the other hand, still hadn’t shaken off his demons. But at least he and Kim had bonded pretty much instantly. To her credit, she had happily embraced the big sister role that had been thrust upon her, and seeing them together was a source of solace in the bittersweet world I seemed doomed to inhabit.
    I threw on a T-shirt and some sweatpants and lumbered down to the kitchen. Despite still feeling groggy, it didn’t take long for the Daland/Maxiplenty case to recede into inconsequence, shoved aside by the resurgent and aforementioned white whales that were crowding my mind. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My globetrotting adventures with Tess had served to reinforce the notion that we’re never done with the past. Or rather, the past is never done with us. It’s just a matter of the correct key being turned in the right lock and all the secrets come tumbling out. And we can never know how we’re going to deal with them until they’re staring us in the face.
    Shuffling into the kitchen, I could hear Tess in her home office, tapping away at her desk with the usual deft precision. It still took me twice as long as it should to file a simple report. I poured myself some coffee, glanced at the front page of the New York Times on Tess’s charging iPad, then wandered, mug in hand, into the study, where my very own bestselling novelist/paramour was busy knocking out yet another page-turner.
    She sat behind a very cool, huge aluminum desk that had been crafted from the tip of an old aircraft’s wing; a gift from yours truly after her first novel hit the New York Times bestsellers list. Her eyes lingered on her screen as I sat down in an armchair facing her, coffee cradled in both hands. My attention was drawn to the rear of the house. The deck and small garden were, I now noticed, dotted with strands of miniature red and green lights. I gazed through the French doors, transfixed for a moment, then Tess looked up and smiled that radiant smile that always makes me give a conflicted and perverse thanks for the violent night when we first met.
    She swung her long legs out from behind the desk. “Christmas lights and two thousand words already. Not a bad morning’s work, huh?”
    I smiled. “You’re such a slacker. No lunch break for you.”
    She tilted her head and pursed her lips. “Actually, I figured we’d skip lunch and just head upstairs and you could help me choose which dress to wear Thursday night. Unless you have other plans?”
    I was about to voice an objection—I mean, sure, we were going to be having dinner with the president. The president. At the White House. The dress choice was, I guess, important—and then, the look on her face as she’d said it