2. Vaughn
TWO
VAUGHN
I shoved my tie into my pocket and shouldered my way through the front door of my Upper West Side townhome.
Another investor had passed on the company, which meant I’d have to go begging again.
My construction company was stagnating. Stagnation was as good as shrinking, and shrinking was as good as failure.
Failure was unacceptable.
It was only one of my companies, but I couldn’t bear the thought of failure.
Most of my fortune had been made off a patent for a specific type of scaffolding connection.
From there, I’d grown my one-man-van general contracting business to a multimillion-dollar corporation.
Now I had the construction business, the patent money, an equipment rental company, and a labor hire company.
If the construction business plateaued or even collapsed, it would be a rounding error in my total wealth.
But I couldn’t let it happen. It wasn’t about the money. It was about achievement. About controlling every possible outcome to make sure that me and mine were always taken care of. No matter what. To give my people the stability I’d never had.
And to do that, I needed an in. I needed someone who moved in circles above my own, who had politicians’ ears, who would introduce me to the true power brokers of the city.
Then my future—and my daughter’s—would be secure.
“Daddy!” a familiar little voice called out moments before the pitter-patter of a five-year-old sprinting echoed down the hall.
I dropped my laptop bag and knelt. Charlotte collided with me, her little arms circling my neck.
I stood as her legs hooked around my waist, squeezing me tight with all the love in her little frame.
Her hair was wet and she was in her PJs.
She smelled like overly fruity hair products, and she held onto me like she never wanted to let go.
Charlotte was the reason I did this. The reason I kept doing this.
I’d bought this four-bedroom townhome before Charlotte existed—before her mother and I even knew each other—and spent a year and a half renovating it into the light-filled beauty it was now.
It was in a good school district, and I’d imagined a wife and multiple kids filling the rooms with life and joy.
I hadn’t imagined being a single dad and only getting snippets of time with my daughter two weeks at a time when I had custody of her, carving out evenings and weekends in between trying to grow the company and solidify my legacy.
Lately, it felt like my snippets of time with her were getting shorter and shorter—something my ex-wife loved to point out.
She didn’t tend to point out that my work was what let her live in a paid-off house with a lifestyle multiple levels above what she and her new husband would be able to afford without me.
But even with everything else I’d accomplished, being a father was the best thing I’d ever done.
“Hey, turkey. Did you have fun with Billie?”
“We made a fort! Come see!” She wriggled until I let her down, then clamped a hand on my wrist and towed me deeper into our home.
In the mouth of the living room, the nanny who had been a lifeline these past couple of years smiled. “Hi, Vaughn. Charlotte had two servings of spaghetti tonight, and a yogurt with orange slices for dessert.”
“I was hungry,” Charlotte confirmed with an exaggerated nod.
Billie smiled, then looked at me. “I have to run. I have a dinner to get to tonight.”
“Still dating Finance Guy?”
Billie laughed and shook her head. “That didn’t work out. I met a guy at my climbing gym, though, and he seems nice. Down-to-earth.”
“Enjoy. Thanks for your help today,” I said, and nodded toward the door with a smile.
The nanny disappeared, and I crouched down into the fort that now dominated the living room. Charlotte gave me a tour of the space, including the area she’d reserved for her dolls. I sat with my knees scrunched up at my chest, letting the tension of the day drain away.
When I told her she was allowed to sleep in the fort tonight, my daughter gave me the kind of smile that felt like a punch to the chest. One of those moments that made me sure I’d do anything for her.
A little while later, when Charlotte was asleep with one arm curled around her pillow and her favorite blanket wrapped around her legs, I leaned against the kitchen counter and ate leftover spaghetti noodles, mulling over my options.
I had to attract some serious money if I wanted to keep the business growing and be able to bid on the kind of jobs that meant something in this city.
But every time I met with an investor, I was told some variation of “no, thank you.” It’s like they looked at me and didn’t believe I belonged in the same room as them, even though my wealth often elapsed theirs.
The company didn’t match the risk profile they were looking for.
The construction industry was too volatile.
I wasn’t offering anything different in a crowded market.
Maybe I was too dumb, or too crass, or too blue collar. I couldn’t hear the language I was supposed to speak, even when it sounded like we understood each other. I was missing something, and I had no idea what it was.
Actually, I knew exactly what it was. The moneyed class were a bunch of shallow, vain liars who licked each other’s boots for fun.
They could tell I had a speck of integrity, and they weren’t interested in having anything to do with me.
I’d learned that young, when my coward of a father had begged, borrowed, and stolen everything he could to try to be one of them.
He’d ruined our family chasing get-rich-quick schemes, and my mother had indulged and enabled him.
It had been a childhood of instability. On multiple occasions, Mother had woken me in the middle of the night and told me to pack my bags, and then we’d be sneaking out of a home we could no longer afford.
Moving every time one of my father’s ventures went south.
Dodging loan sharks—and being caught by them.
I’d made sure I would never, ever , go back to that life. Now I just needed to take one last step to ensure it for my daughter, for her children, for good.
So what was I missing? Why didn’t any of these bigger fish want to take a bite?
Frustration couldn’t even begin to describe what I felt. Even the waitress at lunch treated me like some kind of fraud. Sassing me as she flicked that blond ponytail over her shoulder. Looking at me like I wasn’t worth the gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
What the hell did she know?
Some pretty little waitress who knew just how to keep a dirty old man on the hook, like she had with Roger at lunch today, thought she was better than me? She didn’t know anything about me or my life.
My bowl clattered against another as I put it in the dishwasher, frustration making me clumsy. From the living room, I heard Charlotte stir.
I gripped the edge of the counter and breathed out my anger.
My daughter was the reason I’d done all this.
I wanted to give her more than what I had.
Every opportunity, every chance, every leg up.
She would never wonder if she’d have to be the new kid at school for the umpteenth time.
She’d never have to wear clothes three sizes too small and eat peanut butter sandwiches three times a day for a week straight until some money came in.
All I could do was keep trying. I stalked to my home office across from the living room where Charlotte slept, opened my laptop, and went back to work.
In the morning, after eating breakfast with Charlotte and greeting Billie, I stopped at one of our construction sites in Midtown.
My company had won the bid to build a twenty-seven-story building, and we’d successfully got it out of the ground before winter.
It was meant to be a stepping stone to bigger jobs.
It was supposed to be the kind of project that put my company on a powerful investor’s radar.
There was an important concrete pour happening to start forming some of the structural columns, and I stayed long enough to make sure that things were going smoothly.
They were not.
Concrete trucks had to be rejected for quality defects, one of the subcontractors had brought on unsafe equipment, and one of our engineers had caught a mistake on the drawings we were supposed to be casting in concrete that very morning.
The weather was colder than forecast, and it was teetering on the edge of too cold for the concrete to cure properly.
In other words, the morning was an unmitigated disaster. My control of the project was slipping, which made my skin itch.
By the time I made it to the office, it was just before noon and I felt like I’d been awake for days. If we couldn’t pull off the Midtown job, all hope of finding an investor would be lost.
The elevator opened onto the forty-second floor that I’d leased and renovated in the first big company expansion.
The company logo welcomed me on the wall across from the elevators, and then glass doors slid open to allow me entrance to the executives’ wing.
It smelled like recycled air and old coffee.
I waved at my CFO, Jim Davis, through the glass wall of his office, and then ducked into my own.
I kicked off my work boots and noticed my second pair in the corner.
I’d have to remember to tell my assistant to bring one of them back down to the car.
My chair squeaked when I dropped into it, and I braced myself before booting up my computer, knowing from the buzzing of my phone that I’d have an avalanche of emails to attend to.
I was tired .
And that’s when I saw it.
Scrawled on the back of the quarterly finance report was a note. The handwriting was neat, but whoever had written it had pressed so hard that the paper had deformed, and the imprint of their words was visible on the blue folder beneath. The note read:
Mr. Big Shot,
For three days, I have cleaned the mess made by your dirty work boots.
Tonight, I find myself unable to remove the stain from the carpet.
If you insist on keeping your boots dirty as some macho show of being “one of the guys” when you leave your fancy corner office and go on site, I would appreciate it if you would at least knock the salt and gravel off before traipsing across the carpet.
If that’s too much to ask for, look forward to more salt stains around your office. I will not be cleaning them any longer.
Signed, Your Friendly, Invisible Cleaning Woman
I read the note three times. She didn’t sound fucking friendly to me.
I crumpled the note and chucked it toward the trash.
The ball of paper bounced off the rim of the basket and fell on the floor, just a few feet away from the salt stain that had offended her so much.
I made to get up so I could throw it away properly, then reconsidered.
Maybe when she saw the crumpled paper, she’d get the message.
I didn’t have time for yet another snippy woman who thought she was better than me.
Which made it even more inexplicable that I found myself at Carmine’s once again for lunch. My eyes tracked the swinging blond ponytail across the dining room, and I asked the hostess to seat me in her section.
Maybe I knew how much I’d enjoy the look on her face when she saw me. The shock, quickly followed by disbelief, and then the gratifying clenching of her jaw and narrowing of her eyes.
She’d be beautiful if her attitude wasn’t the size of a small planet. I enjoyed watching her march over to my table and paint an obviously false smile on her face.
“Hi. I’m Alba. I’ll be your server today.”
I hadn’t registered her name yesterday, but I made a note of it now. “Hi Alba,” I said, and put a hand to my chest as I introduced myself. “Vaughn. Good to see you again.”
“We both know that’s a lie,” she shot back, then clamped her lips shut. Her face went faintly red, which was lovely. The blue in her eyes shot thunderbolts at me, and I watched her inhale, then exhale. The vapid smile returned to her face; her mask was back on.
I didn’t want the mask. I wanted the real her. I wanted her to antagonize me so I could spar with her and feel better about the shitshow of my life.
I gritted my teeth in my best approximation of a smile, and I knew it hadn’t reached my eyes. “I’d like to hear the specials, please.”
Her mask dropped, annoyance flashing, and a rush of pleasure went through me. “They’re the same as yesterday. They’re weekly specials, which means they only change once a week. I can try to explain it in smaller words if that’s still too complicated for you.” Her smile was sharp as a blade.
I braided my fingers and leaned my forearms against the table, holding her gaze.
There were so many ways I could’ve let off some steam to relieve the stress of my company’s current predicament.
I could’ve gone to the gym to run it off, or boxed one of the heavy bags.
I could’ve had a few drinks and called one of the friends I’d neglected.
I could’ve found some woman willing to roll around in a bed with me.
But I was here. Antagonizing a waitress who clearly hated my guts.
I arched an eyebrow. “My memory isn’t what it used to be. Remind me.”
Another deep breath, and then she rattled off dishes and their prices. There was a steak sandwich, a seafood dish, and a starter that included some kind of duck. I listened, and when she was done, I said, “I think I’ll have the chicken breast I had yesterday.”
Frustration laced her every expression, from the pinching of her lips to the flashing of her eyes. All she said was, “Of course,” and took the menu from me.
I watched her walk away, admiring her long legs and utterly straight spine. She moved like a dancer, graceful, strong. But the weight of her pride kept her from gliding the way she might’ve otherwise.
When I paid the bill at the end of my meal, she flicked her gaze over the receipt. A muscle jerked in her cheek.
“Something wrong?” I asked, leaning back in my chair.
“No,” she said, then dragged her gaze up to mine. “Thank you.”
Oh, that sounded like it hurt. So it was her pride that weighed her down. And my generous tips were rubbing her the wrong way.
Good.
I grabbed my jacket and scarf, nodded to her, and walked out of the restaurant.