Chapter 1. Alex
ALEX
[DRAFT]
From: Alex Corbeau-Green
Subject: Consumerism (noun) the selfish and frivolous collecting of products
To: Ophelia Winters
An interactive billboard has appeared outside my office building. You’d hate that. Advertisements and forced interaction - your two least favorite things. I can already picture the expression on your face.
Fuck, I miss you.
“ARE YOU AIDING the cops in their search for your father, Alex?”
“Are you polishing your head to make it that shiny, Andre, or is it natural?” I bite back, as the reporter desperately follows me toward the ground floor entrance of Green Aviation’s office building for what must be the tenth time in two weeks.
My cigarette hisses against the trash can outside. The flash of a camera somewhere behind me has me gritting my teeth.
“How’s your mom coping? Any comment on her health?”
I swallow the vitriol sitting in my throat and let Green’s doormen shove the prying media away.
The automatic doors close behind me, and despite all the garish grandeur of Green’s lobby, I’m instantly claustrophobic.
If Green is a pandemic of greed and corruption across the globe, then this shiny office is the rotting epicenter of it all, the sparkling jewel in my father’s empire.
My empire now.
Though, hopefully not for long.
I nod in response to a few overly cheerful good mornings, drumming my fingers on my thigh and willing the elevator to hurry up.
Sonya, my publicist, appears beside me, the cloying scent of her perfume scratching the back of my throat. “Ah, Alex. I was hoping I’d catch you.”
I search the immediate vicinity for an outlet to ram a fork into but come up short. “About?”
“Your press conference for tomorrow. I thought you might want to speak a little on your family at the end.”
Apparently all six elevators are stopping at every floor this morning. “It’s a business conference.”
“I know, but it’d be great for your image. Family man, a united front, even with what’s going on with your father.”
I press the call button three more times, like that’ll do anything. That goddamn reporter has me well and truly rattled. “Would using Andre Jackson from Insider Weekly’s head as a bowling ball be good or bad for my image?”
“Alex, it’s a great opportunity to reassure the shareholders that whatever is going on at home isn’t going to affect—”
The elevator finally arrives, and I hit the button for the penthouse floor and wait until just a sliver of her face is visible between two silver doors to say, “I’ll have Jacqueline put a call in your diary later.”
I slump against the mirror, exhausted before the day has really begun. The claustrophobic metal box fires me unnaturally high in this glass monstrosity of a building, but my mood remains somewhere in the basement garage.
Still, I straighten my collar, smooth the cracks in my mask, steady the shake in my hands, and think of the seven women I do it all for.
The doors slide open after what feels like an age, spitting me out in front of Jacqueline’s desk. It’s quiet on the top floor, thankfully, just the sound of my hammering heart working overtime in my chest.
I rap my knuckles against the desk, an annoying habit of my father’s that I’ve somehow absorbed. “If Sonya emails you about a publicity call—”
“She already has. She’s coming up at three thirty.”
Damn it, these people work fast. “I’m busy at three thirty.”
Her eyes drop to my calendar, open on her laptop screen. “With?”
“I have to …” I rub the back of my neck. “Pick the lint from between the keys on my keyboard?”
“A noble attempt,” she says, handing me a coffee. “Enjoy your meeting.”
Great.
Jacqueline is a short, chaotically dressed woman in her late thirties, and though I like her very much, she genuinely sucks at her job.
I interviewed twelve people for this position, and eleven of them were ruthlessly organized assistants with a résumé an inch thick.
It felt more like they were interviewing me.
With their sharp stilettos, predatory glances, and scarlet fingernails that lingered a little too long on my forearms, they reminded me too much of the women I’d find my father taking out for wholly inappropriate dinners.
Then Jacqueline rocked up, perfectly on time but covered in kids’ stickers.
My background check told me she has three young children, living in an apartment in Queens.
She looked like a deer in headlights—how I felt inside.
She was as lost as I was, but when I asked her the final question, she squared her shoulders beneath her ill-fitting blazer and said, I’m not sure, but I just know we’ll figure it out.
She put so much faith in those words, my daddy issues and I just couldn’t say no.
And she makes a great double espresso.
And like she said we would, we’re figuring it all out. The Green share price is recovering, the media storm is still intense, but we’re not on the front cover of every newspaper anymore.
On the surface, everything is working out. Beneath? I’m fighting for air.
My father is missing. The FBI showed up here to arrest him, and he was nowhere to be found, nor has anyone seen a trace of him since. A team of private detectives and the FBI’s best can’t even catch his scent.
It’s driving me crazy, plaguing my sleep, squashing my appetite.
Oh, and I’m the CEO of an almost-billion-dollar company. The Financial Times called me Manhattan’s wunderkind, when my most tangible experience managing any kind of business was starting a restaurant chain on The Sims with Charlotte and Mia.
I don’t think our “experimental” food restaurant even had walls or a roof.
I had a vague idea of how my life would look at twenty-three. I thought I’d be a fresh-faced architect, or running a smaller company I’d founded myself. Maybe I’d be traveling the world with no responsibilities.
I didn’t think I’d be a CEO with parental custody of my six sisters.
Didn’t think I’d be trying to sneakily arrange my mom’s hospital visits or pay the nanny overtime while I’m stuck in a glass boardroom.
Didn’t think I’d spend my evenings arguing with them over how much they hate having security following them around all day.
And despite all this, it’s a brown-eyed redhead that occupies the majority of my headspace. In the month since I last saw her, I’ve thought of little else.
In my father’s—my—office, a low sun bleeds out over the New York skyline, staining the wall in front of the desk a macabre shade of red.
The glass of the window is cool against my forehead, each heavy breath obscuring the busy comings and goings of a morning in the city. The light on the river is the same color as Ophelia’s hair.
I left her without a word.
To make looking in the mirror a more bearable process, I convince myself that my lawyers asking me not to contact Ophelia is the only reason the draft emails piling up on my laptop never get sent, but I know it isn’t true.
There’s a part of me that thinks I don’t deserve her, and another part of me that’s hurt.
One likes to remind me that I’ve turned her life into a mess of public attention and online hate, and the other plagues my nights with a question I wouldn’t dare to ask myself during the day.
Was any of it real?
I think I’ve accepted by now that Ophelia’s motivation for appearing in my life was so she could gather information, but it’s trying to imagine exactly when her feelings changed that’s keeping me awake into the early hours of the morning.
Was it real when she lay beneath the sofa at Carmichael’s office?
Was it real when I found her drowned at the tarn?
Surely, it was real in the car on Boxing Day, when she held my gaze and gasped my name and made me feel like I was more than enough.
I really, really, need that to be real.
And beneath all of this is one tiny question, one I’m not even sure I have the right to ask.
How could she? I don’t know how that article got leaked to the media.
Deep down, I struggle to believe it was her, but she wrote it, nonetheless.
She must’ve known what it would do to my family when she typed it all up.
It sent my father into a frenzy, throwing guns and clothes into a bag and threatening Fleur and the housekeeper when they tried to stop him from escaping.
It’s put my sisters on the front page of every newspaper, every gossip forum.
What a mess.
Every time I shower and shave in the morning, I see a little more of my father looking back at me in the mirror.
I’m turning into him, like he always said I would.
I can try to pretend I’m all my mother, soft and kind and good, but the illusion is cracking.
I’m fifty percent my father, and that’s a fact I’ll never be able to escape.
Every positive thought has a shadow that trails behind it, biting at my heels no matter how fast I run.
I hate how naturally this role comes to me. How I can hear his voice guiding me through meetings, through finance reports, through tough negotiations.
He trained me to be a CEO, but I wish he’d taught me how to be a man.
There’s this sort of sickness that comes with money: The more you have, the more you crave it. We’ve always been rich, but when the zeroes started piling up on my father’s net worth, he became a different man. It’s an addiction. A total loss of sight of the important things.
Vacations stopped. Family dinners stopped. Christmas presents stopped. All the things he should’ve been doing with his money stopped. Everything went back into Green.
He traded his soul for the promise of more wealth. And for my sisters, I cannot let myself fall down the same hole.