Promises and Pomegranates by Sav R. Miller

Each year, my mother pinched and saved every extra cent she earned
from a daycare in Boston, walking from our crummy apartment in Hyde
Park, foregoing dinner after ensuring I had enough to eat, and making our
own clothes on an electric sewing machine she’d found in an alleyway when
I was an infant.
In all honesty, I’d probably have preferred a meal that didn’t consist of
beans just once growing up over a weekend vacation in the dead of winter—
the only time she could ever seem to get off work—but it was important to
Deidre Anderson that her only son experience some life outside of Boston.
Outside the poverty my sperm donor had thrust us into, that her eventual
cancer would exacerbate.
The first time I returned to the island years after my mother’s death, Jonas
Wolfe was something of a household name; one of Aplana’s few year-round
residents, his parents moved from London when he was a child, and he grew
up on the north end of the island where businesses flourished and everyone
seemed to flock.
One summer, a talent scouted him out for their modeling agency,
catapulting him to fame before he was even a teenager.
Given that Aplana is primarily known for its crab export and wild mint,
Jonas’s discovery gave the island an advantage over those included in the
Harbor’s National Recreation Area, and for a long time they did whatever
they could to lure people to the very place where America’s Next Heartthrob
lived.
Until his twenty-first birthday, when he was arrested and charged with
attempting to assassinate the owner of the island, Tom Primrose. After a brief
stint in jail, during which he confessed to having ties to some secret
organization, Aplana mostly shunned him, with a restraining order being
taken out that didn’t allow him even within spitting distance of the Primrose
mansion.
I recognized a lot of myself in him when news broke out about his arrest,
and so I hired a lawyer, got his sentence reduced, and was there to greet him
as soon as he was released.
During his incarceration, I acquired ownership of the Flaming Chariot,
his dive bar that clearly operated as a front for whatever gang or society he
was loyal to, then offered a partnership in exchange for his services.
He’d only failed at the attempt because of a leak, it turned out.
Among the criminal underground on the East Coast, Jonas Wolfe was