Jackson #2
I didn't admit the word. I filed it as a high-risk visual distraction and moved on.
I had seen beautiful women at every standard-issue corporate function since I was twenty-one.
It was an entry requirement for the zip code.
But tonight, sitting across from her in a booth that smelled of old leather and single-malt, the geometry of her face was actively interfering with my ability to recall our third-quarter margins.
I was not my brother. Logan had always gone soft for a pretty face and a sad story, and it had cost this family its dignity.
"Jackson," Maxwell grunted, not offering his hand. "Your girl here was just telling me about the frost that hit the estate grounds last November. Ruined my entire batch of dahlias down in Olympia, but she tells me Greta used a burlap wrap technique that saved the roots."
"Ms. Bishop has a wealth of domestic information," I said, my tone dry enough to parch the table.
Kim didn’t falter. She took a slow sip of her pinot noir, her eyes tracking me over the crystal rim with an infuriatingly placid calm. "Mr. Whitlock prefers his logistics rigid. He doesn’t believe in roots. He prefers things pre-fabricated and delivered on a flatbed."
Maxwell let out a great, wheezing bark of a laugh that made two customers at a neighboring table turn around. "By God, she’s got your number, boy. Your father was the same way. Always looking at the delivery schedule, never looking at the dirt."
By the second course, the old man was eating out of her palm.
She didn’t talk strategy; she didn’t mention our competitors or our pricing structures.
She asked him about his granddaughter’s cello recital in Vancouver, referencing specific dates she must have extracted from my mother’s old correspondence files, and the old man's face softened until he looked like a different person from the one who'd threatened to walk.
When Maxwell went to use the restroom before the dessert service, he caught my elbow near the mahogany bar.
"I met her last year, you know," the old man muttered, his breath smelling of prime rib and expensive port.
"On my eightieth. Your mother didn’t send a card, Jackson.
She sent that girl. Personally. Delivered a three-foot Japanese maple and a basket of yellow roses.
" He shook his head, his eyes turning watery.
"Sharp as a diamond, that one," he sighed, patting my shoulder with a heavy, old hand.
"The girl is why I’m signing the renewal tomorrow.
Tell your legal team to drop the amendments. We stay with Whitlock."
When I returned to the booth, Kim was waiting. The table had been cleared. She lifted her water glass toward me, half an inch. A small, silent toast. Her message was perfectly clear: I performed the task. Locate your spreadsheet.
I held her gaze, refusing to acknowledge the gesture by moving my own glass, but I didn’t look away either. That, within the parameters of our current cold war, was an admission of territory lost that I wasn’t prepared to investigate.
At home, even the livestock had defected.
Maple, my mother’s fourteen-pound, perpetually hostile tabby cat—an animal that had spent the last eight years treating both of Greta’s biological sons like trespassers—was curled into a dense, orange crescent on top of Kim's feet when I entered the study.
The cat wasn't just tolerating her. She was purring—a deep, full-body rumble—like she'd found the only competent person on the property.
As I crossed the threshold, Maple lifted her head, delivered a look of feline contempt in my direction, and went back to sleep.
"Your mother’s familiar appears to have a low opinion of your stride," Kim said from the sofa. She was buried under a woolen throw, a stack of engineering blueprints balanced on her knees, her face scrubbed clean of the restaurant makeup.
"That animal is an invasive species with fur," I said, dropping my briefcase onto the desk. "She’s spent a decade looking for an opportunity to commit a felony."
"She let me brush her back this morning without scratching my wrists."
"She’s also old and her cognitive faculties are deteriorating," I replied, unbuttoning my cuffs. "Her judgment is structurally compromised."
Kim’s mouth twitched at the corner, a flicker of amusement she killed before I could document it. I closed my laptop and left the room before she could formulate another insult.
On Saturday morning, the peace was officially breached.
I heard the distinctive, aggressive exhaust of a low vintage roadster echoing up the gravel driveway while I was reviewing the second-quarter tax provisions in the library. The front door swung open with a light, unannounced thud.
I met him in the kitchen. He had already discarded his linen jacket over the back of a barstool and was helping himself to the glass carafe of coffee Kim had prepared before she’d departed for the market.
"I already have one individual under this roof whose contract requires them to irritate me on a daily basis," I said, leaning against the doorframe with my arms crossed. "What is your specific function today?"