Chapter 8. Alex
ALEX
[DRAFT]
From: Alex Corbeau-Green
Subject: Breathing (verb) Harder than they’d have you believe
To: Ophelia Winters
Twice in my adult life, I’ve forgotten how to inhale. Both times involved you in a backless dress.
THE SHOWER HAS been off for so long that the water on the glass door is dry. The rhythmic drip, drip, drip of my wet hair stopped at least twenty minutes ago.
My fingers flex and unflex around the sides of the sink, a shaky exhale clouding the mirror.
Everything is gray today. Worse than usual.
It’s been nine days since I got back, ten days since Ophelia rearranged my universe with a single kiss and then told me to leave.
I can’t make sense of anything. Can’t understand why my six funny, clever girls and our loving mother downstairs aren’t enough to make me happy.
Behind my reflection, I practically see the word ungrateful flashing above my head.
I woke up, I exercised, I ate breakfast with my sisters. I did everything I was supposed to, and I still feel like shit.
But if I die today, I won’t get to try Mia and éléanor’s stupid two-day-long focaccia recipe that they’ve been going on about for a week.
My phone buzzes as I slide my rings onto my fingers and tame my unruly—but trimmed, at long last—hair. Mike Wilson.
My second-in-command is probably wondering what the hell I’m doing.
I hit decline and pull on a shirt and slacks.
“Alexandra,” says Mia, spoken like one of the royals in those regency romance shows she watches. I pretend not to watch or care about even though I’ll put the TV in the trash if the maid doesn’t end up with the duke.
“Come in.”
Mia cracks the door open, peering in. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Are you planning to go to work at any point?
“Shut up.”
“Great comeback. What else you got?”
“Shut up.”
“This is good material. Do you do weddings?”
I shrug on a jacket. “Funerals and divorces?”
“Great. I’ll book one of each.”
I smile and ruffle her dark hair. “You should be studying.”
“I am. But I thought I’d come and check on you. Worried for the family millions, you know?”
My phone lights up with an incoming call. “So is Mike, it seems.”
She’s right behind me as I head down the stairs. Did I have this much joie de vivre at fifteen? Doubt it.
“I’m surprised you kept him.”
“Mike?”
“Yeah. I mean, he was always up Dad’s ass, so—”
“Thanks for that visual, Mia. Mike is good, he knows his stuff.”
She gags behind me, following me to the door. “What happened on your London trip?”
“Nothing.”
“Well … something did. You’ve been weird since you got back. ”
“Nope.”
“Did you go to Scotland?”
I wince. “Mia.”
“Well, Beatrice Jones said that you showed up at the Sorrowsong Ball and then I saw someone posted a photo of you and—”
I hate that everyone seems to care what I do.
Hate that my appearance at the ball has only prompted more unkindness toward Ophelia.
It’s not exactly helpful when I’m trying to convince her that things are better when we’re together.
“By engaging with that content you’re only perpetuating the cycle we’re in. ”
Her tone is more serious now, and she looks a lot more like her twin sister all of a sudden.
Evie has always been the more pragmatic of the two.
Mia … well, Mia once threw a boiled egg at Dad, so …
not so pragmatic. “Well, maybe if you talked to us more, we wouldn’t be forced to look for details of your private life on random websites. ”
I turn to face her, but she’s already stomping back up the stairs.
brENDAN VIDEO CALLS me as soon as I’ve sat down at my desk and accepted a steaming coffee and a concerned glance from Jacqueline. “Hello?”
“Hey, one sec, bear with me. I’m on Minecraft.” His eyes are focused somewhere else, mouth in a determined line.
“At eleven a.m.?”
“Yeah, at eleven a.m. What time would you rather I did it?”
“Not when you’ve called me.”
“You were a lot less of a dick before you were a CEO, Corbeau. You’re all the same. If you didn’t pay ridiculous money, I’d be long gone.”
I wince at that. Was my father like me before he became the man he is now?
“Tell me what you know.”
He ruffles his hair beneath his black hoodie, looking a bit uncomfortable. “I’ve traced the article leak.”
Fuck. I’ve been so hyper-focused on my father’s whereabouts, I almost let myself forget about the article. “And?”
“It’s a college buddy of mine.”
Confusion and frustration swamp me in equal measure. “Who?”
“She works in tech, like me. She knows what she’s doing. Buried her tracks so well that it took me months to find her.”
She’s a hacker, basically.
“Who paid her?”
He throws up a hand, lips pressed together. “She won’t say. It would be a real breach of the unspoken code for me to keep asking. You wouldn’t want me disclosing that I work for you to strangers. We all respect each other’s work.”
My life is being fucked over by some hacker bro-code. “We need to find out who it was.”
“I’m working on it, but man, her drives are hard to get into.”
If I was my father, I’d have the information tortured out of her.
But I’m not.
“I have one lead. She’s not really in this for the money. All her jobs follow a trend.”
“Like?”
“In college she hacked into someone’s bank and wired the money to his wife. Turns out he’d been abusing her real bad. She mostly works for vulnerable women, women who’ve been let down.”
Like Ophelia. “Do we even know this was a request? Could she have stumbled across what happened to Ophelia’s parents and done it to get revenge for a mistreated woman?”
“It was a request. She’s told me that much.”
“It’s got to be someone we don’t know. That’s the only possibility I can imagine.”
Mack appears on the other half of the screen, a baseball cap pulled low over his tanned face. “What have I missed?”
“Alex thinks I’m a dick for playing Minecraft. And I’ve filled him in on the article leak.”
“Any ideas on who it could be, Alex? We’re tentatively narrowing it down to female, but it could still be anyone.”
“No idea. I’ll have to call Ophelia. Could be someone from her past.”
“Otherwise, the possible sighting of your father in the UK was false. It was some other guy on the run. I have a lead that would place him in New York.”
My nails dig into my palms beneath the desk. I’m furious, but I’m not surprised. My father has been expertly dodging the law in so many ways for so many years. He’s only doing what he does best.
There’s a small part of me that prays my father is here, far away from Ophelia, but another part of me wants him a long way from my family.
I hate that I can understand her logic, can understand why she suggested no strings.
Ophelia has known nothing but loneliness and isolation for her entire adult life. The man she deserves would be at her side right now, holding her, protecting her.
That isn’t me. I can’t be that man.
But I’d die trying to make it our reality.
I hang up on them and let my head rest in my hands. I’m surrounded by great people, and yet I’m desperate to feel anything that isn’t gray.
Orange would do.
Alex
Where are you?
Ophelia
Just got back from the pool. About to shower, why?
A sparse but steady string of texts between us has formed since I got back.
She isn’t icing me out, but it’s going exactly how she predicted it would, an endless loop of: sorry, call you laters and something came up, let’s do tomorrows.
I call her while she’s in a lecture, she calls me back while I’m getting Josie to bed, I call her back and she’s swimming.
A tempting sort of torture that I’d take over her silence any day.
I hit FaceTime on her contact, and her concerned face fills my screen after a few rings. She’s naked save for a towel that wraps over her chest. “What’s wrong?”
My brain short-circuits at the sight of her. “Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“You look beautiful.”
“And that’s what’s wrong?”
I laugh. “Yeah.”
“You know you can still talk to me about anything.”
“Turn the camera.”
She purses her lips, but her eyes flicker with something that makes me feel drunk. “Alex, we’re …”
“No strings, taking it slow, whatever you say,” I drawl, like it’s all boring semantics I don’t care for.
She does as I ask and turns the camera toward the mirror, exposing every dizzying inch of her reflection.
My fingers postpone my next meeting without my brain even having to ask them to.
Copper hair tumbles over the pale skin of her breasts, messy waves licking her stomach like flames.
I press the knuckles of my free hand to my lips to try to keep my errant mouth shut before I scare her off again.
“Good girl. Put your foot up on the sink.”
She does as I ask, I’m convinced the world starts spinning westward. “Next?” she breathes, and my heart stutters.
“Fuck, Ophelia. Let me see you touch yourself.” Her eyes drift shut, mouth dropping open as her hand moves off camera. My fingers curl around the edge of the desk, like I might start levitating any moment now. “You drive me insane.”
She tilts her head back in a slow, languorous movement, and I think she’s trying to finish me off, because her tongue darts out to wet her lips before she says, “You too. Please.”
I have my office door locked and my belt unbuckled in half a second, and the sound she makes when I groan her name feels so much more significant than anything else I could achieve in this office.
And it’s just so easy to pretend. When she breathes out my name, it sounds no different than it did when she was sure she wanted me.
A little orange thread ties itself in a stitch somewhere inside my rib cage.
What’s one more string in a sea of ten thousand?
I BLOCK OUT fifteen minutes in my schedule every afternoon for the rest of the week, just in case Ophelia wants to repeat what happened earlier today.
Then I reluctantly text Mike and Luis and tell them I’m free for our meeting, swiveling to face the city. The rain is a fine mist that turns the sidewalks dark and the roads shiny.
Where are you, Cain?
Mike knocks and enters, juggling his laptop, phone, notebook, and a steaming cup of coffee. “How was your call with the French?”
“Good, actually. Reminded them that five airports have cut their contracts with Vortex this year alone. We’re a no brainer, even with the drama around my father.”
“We’ve got to land Nice. There’s so much business from Monaco at the moment.”
“Yeah,” I agree, genuinely trying to care.
I don’t hate running a business. I’d do it again, but maybe when I’m older and wiser. I like negotiating, like analyzing the numbers, but private jets and airports don’t interest me in the slightest.
In some twisted way, every bit of profit I make here feels like a favor to my father. Look at me, Cain, doing exactly what you always said I’d do.
I took on Synx, the cybersecurity firm, purely to have leverage over Rocco, a way to force him to agree with my plan not to let him use Green helicopters as a tool anymore.
No more hits, no more bugging helicopters with listening and tracking devices.
But now I’m considering keeping it, even after I leave Green.
Luis comes in, nodding at us both. “Fucking LAX.”
“What about them?”
“Three jets in the hangar for maintenance. All delayed. Staff shortage.”
“I’ll talk to them straight after this,” I say, tapping my pen on my thigh. So much of this job is just being angry over the phone.
Maybe Ophelia should do it.
My phone buzzes.
Vincenzo
Guess who’s nose I just broke
Alex
Your own?
Vincenzo
Not this time. Hugo from the Sorrowsong soccer team
Alex
Wow. That’s a nose on my dream bucket list of noses to break.
Vincenzo
He said something to Ophelia that made her throw a tiramisu at his head at dinner.
My stomach sinks. It would have to be something terrible for her to waste a good tiramisu.
Alex
When it heals, break it again for me.
Vincenzo
If it heals, I haven’t done a good enough job.
I tune back into Luis and Mike’s conversation, dropping a few let’s touch base on that laters, a couple of let’s not reinvent the wheels, and a blue-sky thinking for good measure.
They nod in agreement, moving on to some sales figures we got earlier.
I flick to my calendar while the two of them talk, eyes scanning over the next two weeks.
Mia college open day. Evie dance solo. Boston Aviation Conference.
Mom hospital appointment. élé teacher conference.
Alex
Want me to ruin Hugo’s father’s life?
Ophelia
No, it’s okay. Thanks for the offer though.
Alex
I can’t come to you this week. I’m sorry.
Ophelia
Don’t be sorry, I don’t expect that from you.
And that right there is the issue.