Jade Cabral strides into the 21st century as a golden guy. Brilliant and beautiful, with a California cool and a Harvard education, he is poised for wealth and success in New York’s Financial District.<br><br>But Jade harbors a secret flaw, a thirst for revenge against Se?or Rodriguez, the California landowner who deprived his father – Se?or’s out-of-wedlock son, John Virgil -- of his family’s rightful inheritance and place in the world. Jade thinks if he succeeds in New York, he can make up for every loss and humiliation his family has endured at the hands of Se?or. That searing quest leads him into the arms of Nan Spencer, a lovely, fragile socialite, and to the top of the financial world, the Twin Towers, on September 11, 2001.

Seamless Sky

“Your father would drive to Hell and back if it had an interstate,” his mother once said, exasperated. But Jade blessed him for it, and thanked God for days of lettuce fields dotted by water towers and nights under the stars when his siblings slept all around him in the back seat, and he was alone with his dreams and the ever-present moon and the bell-like sound of his mother’s voice singing softly to the radio.


Nan was a good car-radio singer, too, and she and Jade often dueted on Springsteen’s “Because the Night” as they drove deep into the evening. The rest of the time they talked about the families that each saw only through the eyes of the other. Hers was a chilly portrait gallery—the self-absorbed socialite mother; the brutal businessman/father; the husband who started out a prince only to wind up Henry VIII; the baby lost; the endless miscarriages; the giving up, “surrendering to life,” as she called it.


Chapter 15