18. Atticus
ATTICUS
We returned from Colorado thirty hours ago, but none of us can dismantle our collective failure. We had created a cozy war room that should have reassured her, kept her safe enough to stay, but apparently we only trapped her while her fear metastasized.
I’m trying to be understanding, but when you’ve been ghosted, it’s damn near impossible.
I stand in the half-lit living room now, coffee gone lukewarm, bruise-colored dawn leaking through motorized blinds. Dean surfaces from the guest bedroom looking thirty percent alive. We acknowledge each other with a nod and resume aimless shuffling.
I replay every second between our arrival at the resort and her exit. The bruise on her cheek, the way her body melted when we surrounded her, the micro-smile when Colin pitched the blanket fort, her shy request— Stay, please —like a fragile treaty. We stayed. And she still fled.
Before sunrise. Not even a note or a text.
But that isn’t the point. Her emotional barometer fell below safe. We misread her. And now, we suffer the consequences.
My old morning ritual—journaling before sunrise—has been hijacked.
My pen scratches lines about everything except why my stomach feels carsick whenever I picture her on campus, alone, pregnant, guilt-riddled.
Arabella texted late yesterday, reportedly unbeknownst to Thalassa, to let us know she’s safe.
She might hate us, but I will be forever grateful for that message.
Dean breaks the silence. “You sleeping?”
I mumble at my journal, “Do I look like I’m sleeping?”
He rubs his eyes. “Colin?”
“Coding. I’m gonna head home. You?”
“Work.” He shrugs. “What else is there?”
That’s the question that haunts me every day. I run through my options. We can’t fix her fear. We can’t change her mind about us. But we can fix our company. That’s the perspective my brain clings to. Numbers obey logic. Human hearts do not.
I shower, suit up—dark charcoal, no tie, the retired-but-in-control look—and drive to Copeland HQ. On the ride, I stare at Buckhead mansions, each one a monument to someone’s victory lap, and mutter Dad’s Havana lesson. Hold tight .
But how can I when Thalassa let go? Does that mean we chase?
No. We honor her choice. But giving her space doesn’t mean abdication from everything else.
Dean is drowning behind the CEO desk, Marcus is puppeteering budgets if the last reports are to be believed, and my siblings and our soon-to-be-maybe-child deserve a stable enterprise.
The truth is, we could all retire tomorrow. But what legacy is there in that?
In HQ’s west lobby, the receptionists look up as if my hologram materialized. I nod curt hellos and swipe into the top-floor suite where Dean sits at the teak desk, tie dangling from his finger like he’s debating strangling himself with it. His expression brightens a little when he sees me.
“Let me help,” I say as I plop into the guest chair. “Advisory capacity. Twenty hours weekly. That’s all.”
He exhales relief. “Yes. Please.”
We head in for the weekly finance meeting in the Palmetto Conference Room—Marcus’s lair. The mahogany board table is waxed to a mirror finish. Marcus enters exuding grandfatherly calm, silk tie diamond-pinned.
“Atticus!” Arms wide, voice honey. “I heard you’re dabbling in unscheduled labor.”
How this man knows everything before being briefed, I will never know. “Nice to see you too, Marcus. Thought I’d lend a hand for a little while, get the year off to a running start.”
He chuckles. “But retirement is a treasure. You should spend it leisurely. Here,” he says, patting the seat next to him. “You can sit with me.”
Junior execs snicker obediently. In my younger days, I would have smiled along. This morning, condescension tastes like pennies.
The meeting plods. Marcus dismisses Colin’s StarConnector cost-savings analysis with a wave of his Montblanc. “Redundant when our current system functions splendidly.”
Dean tries to counter but stumbles over the numbers due to his lack of sleep. Marcus circles the room, commanding it, and places a reassuring hand on Dean’s shoulder. “We’ll revisit, son.” He calls us sons as if bloodline crosses departmental hierarchy.
At adjournment, I request to join the risk-management subcommittee. Marcus slides his fatherly hand to my elbow. “Tic, you flourish outside these walls now. Let the engine keep humming.”
I smile politely. I’ve seen him make all these same moves for years. Never noticed how fucking suspicious he is until now. Was Marcus always this protective of his turf? Or has he been biding his time for something grander?
Back in Dean’s office, I review his task avalanche. Vendor renegotiations, lawsuit depositions, and a sustainability initiative stalled. Marcus filters them all. Classic choke point. The CFO gatekeeps resources, and the CEO is reliant on the CFO’s loyalty.
Dean rubs his temples. “Three months in and I’m losing ground.”
“I’ll audit Marcus’s ledgers,” I volunteer. “Quietly.”
Dean flinches. “That’s…extreme.”
“Extreme is hemorrhaging margins while the CFO dodges upgrades.” I keep my voice level. “Let me verify the books.”
“Authorization remains,” he says, meaning I still have super-admin credentials.
“Marcus will object,” I warn.
He shrugs. “Only if he finds out.”
After hours, I prowl the finance wing. Janitorial staff buff floors, and I nod as though performing a routine compliance check.
No cameras on this corridor since we installed occupancy sensors—Marcus killed the budget for upgrades.
Easy enough to make off with one of finance’s laptops, no one the wiser.
In the car, I clone the entire ledger to an encrypted flash. I’m a big believer in backups, and I’m not starting an audit without original data, in case I trigger something. Back in my penthouse, I create a sandbox on air-gapped unit, unleash Python scripts to sniff duplicates.
Four vendor IDs with consecutive numbers funneling payments just under the twenty-five K approval threshold. My chest tightens. The pattern reeks of classic embezzlement.
I don’t want to believe it’s true.
I can still smell the lake mud on Marcus’s old Coleman cooler.
Most Saturday dawns of my childhood began the same way—Marcus idling outside the gate in a dented Ford pickup that looked hilariously mortal beside Dad’s fleet of German sedans.
He would lean on the horn once—no more—and three Copeland boys in mismatched life jackets would scramble down the drive, still chewing toast.
Dad was usually airborne to Rome or Singapore by then; Mom was reading proofs in her study.
Marcus alone supplied the earthbound ritual.
He’d rumple each of our haircuts, pass around thermoses of cocoa sweet enough to stun dentists, and steer north to Lake Lanier with the windows down so Georgia pines whipped the cab with their green scent.
On the water, he never bothered with fancy tackle—just cane poles, red-and-white bobbers, worms he’d bought at the gas station.
When one of us hauled in a bluegill no bigger than a dollar bill, Marcus clapped like it was a record-size tarpon, bragging to the empty cove that “my boys are natural anglers.”?We believed him.
He let us filet the catch ourselves on a plastic cutting board that stank of fish and pride, and he carried every mangled fillet home as if it were caviar for the boardroom.
Off-season Saturdays belonged to the basement workshop he’d carved out of an abandoned loading bay behind the original Midtown restaurant.?The place was sawdust and moth-eaten flannel and the comforting thrum of a band saw older than Marcus himself.
He coached our small hands around chisels, insisting every burr on the wood grain told a story.
We produced lopsided birdhouses and a chess set whose pawns looked like petrified acorns, and Marcus varnished each piece until it shone.
He never corrected our mistakes too early; he let errors ripen into lessons, then showed the gentlest route to repair.
When I became COO years later and started calling defects “process variation,” I realized most of my operational philosophy had been shaped by those afternoons among clamps and shavings, tilted under the warm glare of Marcus’s approval.
He had no children of his own, so he inhaled our milestones like oxygen. At graduation, he clapped harder than our mother. Which is why the ledger anomalies cut like betrayal layered over self-betrayal.
Part of me keeps hunting alternative culprits—rogue accountants, spoofed user credentials—because accepting Marcus as a thief feels like accepting that those dawn voyages and sawdust sermons were set pieces in a long con.
It’s paranoid, I tell myself. Old affection is skewing probability analysis.?But between love and fear, the distance shrinks each hour, and the arithmetic of trust grows harder to solve.