Gregory
Chapter forty-two
The whiskey didn’t burn enough.
I tipped the glass again, letting the heat slide down my throat, hoping it would help relieve some of the stress weighing me down. It didn’t. Instead, it only made my eyes zero in on every failure on my desk. The lawsuits, class-action threats, liquidation notices, federal seizure letters.
Every sheet of paper was another reminder that Newman Trust was dead.
And if Newman Trust was dead, then I might as well be, too. It was all I had left. The legacy I was going to uphold, the name I was supposed to revive. All of it gone… because of me.
A soft coo broke into the silence.
I didn’t have the energy to lift my head at first. Then my office door eased open, and warm light spilled inside.
Cheryl walked in like she owned the place, baby perched on her hip, hair perfect, perfume faint but expensive. The picture of domestic softness… the picture of a woman who believed she belonged here.
“Guess who woke up from her nap?” she chimed, bouncing Marissa gently. “Say, hi, Daddy.”
I forced the muscles in my face to lift.
“Hi, sweetheart.” My voice softened automatically, switching into the role I’d played for years now.
Marissa cooed again, hand reaching for me, but I turned back to my desk and the drink I was nursing. Cheryl’s eyes fell on the chaos.
“…Long night?” she asked gently, eyes flicking to the piles of documents she definitely shouldn’t have been looking at.
“Just working,” I muttered, shutting the folder as Marissa babbled softly once again.
“Greg… you can’t keep doing this, sitting in here every night until dawn. You haven’t slept. You barely eat—”
“I’m fine,” I bit out.
“You’re not,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re running yourself to the ground.” Her eyes softened. “This isn’t your fault.”
A bitter laugh scraped out of me. A person could only hear the same rhetoric a million times before going fucking insane. “It’s everyone’s fault but mine, right?”
She hesitated, just a second. But I caught it. That tiny flicker of doubt. That crack in her perfectly constructed support. The same cracks I saw in my father and in Genevieve.
It pissed me off.
“Greg…” she tried again. “You know that’s not what I mean…
You’ve been carrying this alone. All of it.
And that’s not fair.” She shifted Marissa on her hip, her voice going softer.
“You did everything you could, Greg. You showed up. You tried to hold it together. The person who blew it up is sitting in prison right now.”
I stared at her. She believed maybe half of that. The rest was a performance… the same performance I’d been putting on for years, same one Genevieve had put on… just coming from the other direction now.
I picked up my glass.
“Sure,” I said quietly, and she let out another sigh. “Things will get better. We’ll get through this. As a family.”
Family.
The word sat wrong inside me.
I glanced at Marissa, her fist wrapped in Cheryl’s hair, cheeks rosy from sleep. The daughter I gave attention to constantly, held like she was sacred, babied like she was the world to me.
…And then there was Eugene.
A knot formed in the pits of my stomach. “Where’s Genevieve?” I asked, trying to ignore it.
Cheryl’s expression faltered for the smallest moment. “Sleeping, I think. She’s been tired.”
Tired and pregnant. Cheryl wasn’t a fan of that. My relationship to Genevieve was purely PR in her perspective, given she and I had been together before Gen came into the picture.
It was supposed to be for the face of the company, but then Eugene was born, Genevieve got pregnant again, and for the life of me, I would probably never hear the end of me putting Cheryl second to my so-called fiancée. The irony of it all.
In an instant, her expression changed, back to perfect. “I’ll get this one into the bath and start on dinner soon. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”
I didn’t say anything as the door clicked shut behind her.
The silence rushed back in, and I sank deeper into the chair.
I kept waiting, hoping for things to settle back into the way things were before shit hit the fan.
The Trust collapsing, the federal raid… Before Reid walked back into our lives like he had any right.
He started showing up everywhere she was. Eugene started gravitating toward him like it was instinct. My fiancée, the woman I was supposed to marry, was now a different person entirely.
I let out a humorless breath.
This was insane. I was going insane.
Stress was getting to me. I was reading into things because everything else in my life was falling apart, and the last thing I needed was for this, my home, my family, to crack too, even though it was basically falling apart.
I reached for the whiskey again, letting the burn slide down and settle inside me. It didn’t calm me. If anything, it made the thoughts louder.
I stared at the opposite wall, the framed degrees, the photos, the illusion of stability I’d spent years curating, that my family spent years protecting. The Newman name. My inheritance and my burden.
My eyes fell on the family portrait of Genevieve and me when she was pregnant with Eugene. I stood, walking over to the frame, grabbing it off the wall.
I stared at the picture for a long moment, the memory of that day trying to surface.
Her standing slightly angled toward me because the photographer told her it would soften the look, my hand on her stomach because that’s what a fiancé was supposed to do, the smile she gave that never quite reached her eyes.
…I’d never noticed that before.
Or maybe I had, and I’d convinced myself it meant something different back then.
I traced a thumb along the edge of the frame. The more I looked, the more wrong it felt. The woman in the picture, the son we raised, something about it felt… wrong.
I told myself I was imagining it. That it was the alcohol talking, my poor planning and lack of presence as a father ridiculing me, exhaustion from being the failure everyone coddled mocking me, being in the shadow of the man who erased whatever dignity or respect I had left enraging me.
It should’ve been all of that.
But then another thought slipped in louder than the rest:
When did she start looking at me like that again?
Blank… distant. Present in her body, somewhere else entirely in her mind.
I dragged a hand down my face. I didn’t recognize the woman in the photo, didn’t recognize the woman I walked past every day now… Genevieve… My Genevieve was gone.
And every time she faded like that… there was always one constant, one man at the center of it:
Reid.
His presence or his disappearance.
It affected her deeply, her emotions, her behavior… everything about her changed with him… It was never that way with me.
Placing the photo down, another thought passed my mind, another ridiculous thought that screamed louder than the rest…
Genevieve was pregnant again. Reid was taken into custody… He left again. And she was a different person… again.
Come to think of it… When was the last time she and I were even… intimate?
The question hit harder than it should’ve. I reached for the memory… and nothing came.
Just weeks bleeding into months.
And then dates lining up in my head in a way that made my vision darken at the edges. The night Reid came back… that was the last time.
The math of it all—the math wasn’t adding up.
I dragged both hands down my face, pacing once, twice, breath growing uneven. My brain pounded in my skull, jogging my memory years ago for the same question. And still, even the timeline of her first pregnancy was… hazy. Close enough to assume, but not enough to be certain.
My hands landed on the edge of my desk, my failures staring back at me—but I didn’t care about that anymore.
I didn’t know what bothered me more. The possibility that I’d overlooked something back then… or the possibility that I was overlooking it again now.
My fingers dug into wood until it groaned.
Either way… I needed answers.
And I was going to find out one way or another.