Chapter 1 Eight Years Later #2
Across from him, seated on the long red leather sofa her father had custom-made last year, Harold Vernon removed his reading glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
He had been her father’s lawyer for as long as Anne had been alive, and while that job alone proved that he had the patience of a saint, she could tell he was close to his breaking point.
“Walter,” Mr. Vernon said, leaning forward. “I know this is difficult—”
“No, this is ridiculous!”
“No, this is divorce,” the lawyer replied bluntly.
The sound of the front door closing behind Anne drew the attention of both men. Unfortunately, their reactions to seeing her could not have been more different. While Mr. Vernon looked relieved at her arrival, her father’s desperate expression turned to a scowl.
“Did you know about this?” her father barked.
Anne blinked. “Know about what?”
Walt let out a wail while Mr. Vernon sighed deeply.
“The judge finally ruled on the divorce settlement,” the lawyer replied.
“Stop using that word!” Her father stomped over to the black-and-gold bar in the corner to make a drink, blissfully ignorant that it was eleven a.m. on a Monday.
Here we go, Anne thought, bracing herself. She had known about the divorce for a while. If she was being honest, before the wedding itself, though she had been smart enough to keep that to herself for the past few years.
Walt had met his second wife at a cocktail party in Los Angeles.
MacKenzie was an influencer looking to break into television and hadn’t been bothered by the twenty-year age gap, especially when Walt promised to develop a series exclusively for her.
But things began to fall apart quickly after their wedding in Tulum three years ago, and now there was no series, no money, and no MacKenzie.
The last Anne heard, she was living in Ibiza with her new restaurant-tycoon boyfriend, and communicating about the divorce exclusively through her lawyer.
“And?” Anne asked.
Mr. Vernon put his reading glasses back on as he brought his attention back to the papers in his hand. “MacKenzie was awarded fifty percent of all shared assets. Including this apartment.”
Walt let out another wail. With his monthly Botox injections, it should have been impossible for him to look haggard or stressed. Today proved to be the exception.
Anne shook her head. She hated that she was surprised. It was no secret that her father hadn’t made MacKenzie sign a prenup. Still, it felt like the air had been knocked from her lungs.
“All right,” Anne said, the numbers already running through her head. “So what does that mean, logistically?”
Mr. Vernon barely concealed a grimace. “Her lawyers have already written to the co-op board about her intention to sell.”
Anne slowly sat down on the other end of the sofa.
So that’s how her mother had known. Bianca Russell had been the Uppercross co-op board president for a decade before she moved out following her own divorce from Walt.
She had ruled all eight floors of the building with an iron fist and still stayed in touch with many of the board members.
“What am I going to do?” Walt lamented.
“As I see it, you’ve got two options,” Mr. Vernon replied. “It’s clear MacKenzie isn’t interested in the apartment, just the financial incentives. With that being the case, you could buy her out of her half.”
Even as he said it, the lawyer looked dubious, and Anne couldn’t blame him.
Walt Elliot’s lack of fiscal responsibility was no secret.
Even as a child she had suspected that his spending habits were out of control.
But the true weight of it wasn’t something she’d had to consider until after her parents’ divorce.
When she took over the day-to-day running of Kellynch, she had created a detailed personal budget for her father, in an effort to curb his spending and keep him from dipping into the company’s profits to fund his whims. If he had followed it like he’d promised, not only should he have a healthy savings account, but his credit score probably improved, too.
If, she thought to herself.
“Buy her out?” Walt cried. “It’s my apartment! Besides, I don’t have that kind of money just lying around.”
“You don’t need the entire sum,” Anne replied. “We can take whatever you have in your savings, then take out a mortgage to fill in the gap.”
“You want me to take out another mortgage?”
Anne stilled. There had never been a mortgage on his apartment.
Bianca Russell had come to their marriage with blue-blood family money, and Walt had received a healthy settlement for their seventeen years together.
And while Bianca took her remaining fortune and spent her time traveling around the world with a steady stream of younger boyfriends on her arm, her father had gotten the apartment and then proceeded to spend his income on plastic surgery and vacations.
“What do you mean ‘another’ mortgage?” she asked.
Her father rolled his eyes. “Did I mortgage this apartment last year? Yes. But that was only to pay off a few outstanding personal loans.”
“What about the savings account we set up for—”
“You have to spend money to make money, Anne! Everybody knows that.”
Anne let out a long breath, hoping it would somehow dilute the mix of frustration and disappointment swirling in her chest. Why was she even surprised?
This wasn’t a new problem. Walt had been overspending for years without consequence.
It was part of the reason her mother had left him.
Yet Anne had naively thought that if she stayed close by, she might be able to curb it.
That had been the main motivation behind living at home through college, then later for working at his company.
Walt couldn’t possibly put his livelihood in jeopardy under her watchful eye, right?
Right, she thought dryly, shaking her head.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. When she graduated with honors from Columbia Business School six years ago, she almost immediately started working at a large hedge fund in Manhattan.
The work had been exciting at first, with days spent working with numbers and projections, promises of promotions, and a defined track for success.
But within a few months she couldn’t ignore the moral gray area she was forced to work in.
She quit unceremoniously one Tuesday afternoon after a meeting where her boss made a joke about foreclosing on people’s homes, and she walked out the door feeling like a thousand-pound weight had been removed from her neck.
Walt Elliot obviously hadn’t seen it that way, though, berating her for the loss of her title and her salary.
A few days later she happened to answer a call from her father’s accountant and learned just how close Kellynch was to bankruptcy.
The solution seemed obvious: She had an MBA, why not use it to help save her father’s business?
The fact that she went on to spend the next five years digging his production company out of crippling debt over and over again had not been part of the equation, though.
Walt rarely acknowledged it, either. He paid her close to nothing, but then he also didn’t charge her rent, so perhaps the expectation was that she would ignore everything else going on in his life.
Unfortunately for him, old habits die hard.
“Dad, we’ve been over this—”
“Don’t take that tone with me,” he hissed. “I have it all under control. Once we sign the contract for another season of Divorce Divas, the initial payment will cover—”
“There’s no contract, Dad,” Anne cut him off. She could already feel a headache coming on. “Not for a while, anyway.”
Walt’s face blanched. “What?”
“The network put us on hiatus.”
“Why?”
“Remember that fight Denise got into with Marsha last month?”
Her father stared at her blankly.
Stupid question, she thought. It had been months since Walt even stepped foot in the Kellynch offices.
“Well, Denise attacked Marsha, and now Marsha, along with the restaurant, is pressing charges. We can’t even finish the current season until the investigation and trial are over, which could take months.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Walter moaned, slumping back onto the red leather sofa as he cradled his glass to his chest.
Anne tried not to roll her eyes as she turned back to Mr. Vernon. “You said we had two options. What’s the second?”
Mr. Vernon’s expression turned grim. “Sell the apartment.”
The words landed like a lead weight in Anne’s brain.
“Sell?” her father said, frantically gesturing around the apartment with his free hand. “This is where I live!”
Where we live, Anne wanted to correct him.
But she kept her mouth shut. To her father, the only thing more embarrassing than having his daughter swooping in to save him from financial ruin was having that same daughter still living at home at almost thirty years old because he couldn’t afford to pay her enough to move out.
“Do you have another idea?” Mr. Vernon asked.
Her father took a half second to consider. “I could sell my Max Betrug painting.”
Anne had to close her eyes to school her frustration. “That’s a print, Dad. Not an original painting.”
“What about the Bentley?”
“You sold that two years ago.”
Walt’s head fell back as he wailed again.
“This is the best option, Walt,” Mr. Vernon replied. “You can use your half of the sale to pay off some debt and rent someplace nearby. Maybe in Brooklyn.”
“You want me to move to Brooklyn?” Walt exclaimed. “But my masseuse is here! I built these bookcases specifically to feature my Emmy!”
Her father continued his monologue, but Anne blocked it out.
She was good at that. Instead, she turned and stared out the nearby window as she tried to curb the panic that was already clouding her analysis of the situation.
The apartment was on the eighth floor, and she could see the treetops that canopied Tompkins Square Park just below.
The leaves were starting to change from green to autumnal reds and yellows.
In a few months they would be adorned in Christmas lights and covered with snow.
You can do this, she thought, forcing her heart rate under control. She just needed a plan, time to sit down and go over the situation rationally, work through the numbers systematically, and—
“Alexa!” her father called out without removing his arm, which was currently thrown over his face. A device lit up on the kitchen’s marble countertop on the other side of the room. “Set a reminder to call Dr. Zgonc for a sound healing treatment today.”
“Reminder set,” Alexa replied happily.
“Now, considering this neighborhood and those… renovations, I’m sure we can sell this place quickly,” Mr. Vernon said. “But we’ll need to work fast to move things along. The president of the co-op board is a Realtor, correct? I’m sure he can—”
“Where’s my ashwagandha?” Walt yelled without looking up. “My herbalist was supposed to deliver it this morning! I can’t have this conversation without my ashwagandha!”
Anne was about to remind her father that perhaps his five-hundred-dollar-an-hour herbalist was one of the reasons he was in this mess, but at the same time, it felt futile.
The full weight of eight years’ worth of relentless work and sacrifice being washed away in one afternoon landed squarely on her chest and all she could do was stand up and walk back out the front door.
Her father was still berating Mr. Vernon as Anne turned down the hall and up the nearby stairs to the building’s roof deck.
The steel door slammed shut behind her as she stepped out into the almost blinding midday sunlight, and the laments from apartment 8A were replaced by the sounds of the city below.
She had grown up in this building. Her father called their apartment the penthouse, but really it was just the top floor of the Uppercross, one of the few taller apartment buildings along Avenue A in Manhattan’s East Village.
Her parents had bought their apartment when her mother found out she was pregnant.
Walt’s way of dealing with impending parenthood was to grasp at any thread of youth and relevance he could, so a newly remodeled, two-bedroom apartment in one of New York’s most iconic—and edgy—neighborhoods was perfect.
He had hoped to absorb some of the neighborhood’s hip pedigree by osmosis, but he soon learned that he would much rather brag about his address than spend any time getting to know the neighborhood.
Not Anne, though. Some of her earliest memories were of wandering the hallways of this building, watching new people move in and familiar faces move out, of all the doormen that played cards with her during their shifts, and the anticipation of the changing seasonal décor—Halloween pumpkins, Christmas lights, summer potted roses and lilies out front.
She remembered the new-paint smell from every time they remodeled the hallway columns, and all the hours she’d spent sitting on the same forest-green leather couches in the lobby before school started.
The winding paths through Tompkins Square Park became her backyard playground, and the shops lining the road were filled with owners who knew her by name, let her do her homework next to them as they rang up customers, and watched her grow up.
Now she had to think about movers and showings. Packing up her life and going… where?
She closed her eyes, letting the wind pull wisps of her blond hair from her neat ponytail.
Even at her most dejected moments, she tried not to let herself look back, to regret decisions that there was no possibility of changing.
But she gave in for a moment there on the roof, allowing herself to linger on all the choices and decisions that brought her to this point.
Suddenly, the crystalline image of Freddie Wentworth landed in the center of her mind.
His kind eyes staring down at her, crinkling at the corners, thanks to his lopsided smile.
Something deep in her chest ached. Thank God he wasn’t here to see her now.