Chapter 2
Gabriel
River Judkins is refusing to help me?
“That’s not how this works,”
I counter.
She scowls, flipping her pale-blonde hair over her shoulder. “How what works, exactly? Because you’re not even telling me what’s going on.”
Standing, I get lightheaded. I press my hand on her desk to keep from swaying. I didn’t think I’d have to tell her everything.
“Gabriel, I’m not being nosy. I’m not some woman in a grocery store with curlers in her hair, okay? But I won’t do this favor for you until I have the truth from you. Ethically, I can’t.”
She presses her lips together, leans back in her chair, and folds her arms.
“What are you talking about?”
Woman in a grocery store with curlers in her hair? “Lawyers don’t need to know if the people they’re defending are guilty or innocent. They’re not the judge. They’re just supposed to represent their client. And that’s what I’m asking you to do.”
“Are there lawyers involved? Because if so, I’ll need their names.”
She sits up straight and resumes typing on her computer like a maniac.
“That’s irrelevant. I was using it as an example.”
There are lawyers from Foundations involved in this mess, but again, that’s beside the point.
“In any case, I’m not a lawyer. We don’t have lawyer-client privilege here and I’m certainly under no obligation to do this.”
“You’re under no obligation, but you’d be foolish to turn down the money.”
She looks like she’s counting to ten in her head. Finally, “I have a form you’d need to fill out in which you explain what you did so I can best help you. It’s just a simple form.”
She must notice how having to detail everything out fills me with dread. Having evidence like that floating around? No way.
“Mr. Tate, you’re a baby bird.”
A baby bird? “Well, I’ve been called worse, so—"
“You’re flying into a glass window over and over again, banging your head against it, refusing to listen to the mama bird who’s telling you which way to fly, how to get out of the mess—”
“And you’re the mama bird, I take it.”
“Exactly.”
I try to conceal a chuckle, but I’m not successful because she glares at me. She stands, and her gaze goes to the picture frame. “Can I see your photo?”
I sigh. It was an odd thing to do, bringing this in with me. I just came from Foundations, where I met with my dad again. Was I groveling to get my job back? Sort of. Whatever it was, his response involved returning this medallion to me . . . by way of tearing it off his office wall and chucking it past me at the door.
“It was my dad’s.”
I chew my bottom lip, then: “I gave it to him, and he decided to give it back.”
I hand over the framed gold plastic medallion with a thick red, white, and blue ribbon threaded through the top with “World’s Best Dad”
embossed on the front. It’s mounted on black, velvet paper. I hadn’t noticed the glass cracked when he threw it. “I was eleven. My aunt Stella took me to a trophy shop to get it.”
Her brows knit together as she stares at it and a soft “oh”
escapes her lips.
We stand there, me feeling pathetic and River looking like, Wow. What do I even say now? I shrug, take it back from her, and tuck it under my arm.
“Sorry,”
she says. “You know what? I once found a tool set I’d drawn on paper in my dad’s trash the day after I gave it to him.”
She grimaces. “Not that it’s the same. And hey, I wouldn’t have wanted a hammer and screwdriver made out of notebook paper either. I mean, come on.”
She smooths her hair and then slides both of her hands down her sides, straightening her dark green suit. I’m not looking—exactly—but the color looks good with her chocolate eyes. “I’m late for a meeting, Mr. Tate.”
Her expression softens even more. “My advice would be to get clear about what you want. What are your goals? What’s the desired outcome? And then contact a private firm in Denver, someone who’s better equipped to handle—”
She makes a circling motion with her hand at me, as if to say All this. “Whatever it is you need handled.”
She perks a smile before walking past me in her heels and opening the door.
This is not how I thought this would go at all.
I’m a Tate. Love us or hate us, and trust me, we have plenty of people on either side, but being turned down is not in our comfort zone.
Still, I’m patient. I’m not feeling like myself these days. I haven’t been feeling like myself in thirty-seven days, to be exact.
The way my dad responds when he doesn’t get what he wants? He pushes harder.
But I’m not my dad. I can be patient.
I nod and try to arrange my tired face into a smile. “Can I ask you for one thing, though?”
River huffs out a breath. “Of course.”
But she sounds wary, and truly, I don’t blame her.
“Here’s my number.”
I hand her my card, and she bunches up her mouth as she takes it. “And don’t rule me out?”
I smile and then dip my gaze to the floor. “Just don’t close the door on me yet.”
Her dark eyes growing wide, she does a little sidestep as she surveys me, her mouth twisting to one side. “I can’t keep a door open that you haven’t even unlocked yet.”
She gives an icy, professional smile then tilts her head back, like I’m done with you now.
I can do nothing except give a polite smile of my own and leave her office. But I don’t turn left to go into the lobby. I take a few steps down the corridor to the right and duck out the back door, relieved I didn’t run into any of my brothers.
There are a few things you need to understand about this situation.
First of all, all of this? Having a really terrible twenty-four hours in Prague—during which I gambled away seventy thousand dollars, every last penny from a fund of my own money I’d been saving to start my own charity, and subsequently got fired from my dad’s company—is all on me.
I’m responsible for my actions. No question.
And yes, I said seventy thousand. Like seven zero, zero, zero, zero.
I’m not blaming anyone else, not even my friend Todd, and his craptastic idea to “get lost”
in Prague to help him get over being dumped by his girlfriend. I was the one who imbibed. I was the one who played poker. I was the one who sucks at poker. And I’m the one who was fired by their own dad, via video chat, at three in the morning before I’d even sobered up.
Just thinking about Prague sobers me up and I haven’t even had a drop to drink since then. Before this, with the exception of my twenty-first birthday a few years ago, I hadn’t had anything to drink. Ever. I didn’t like how it made me feel on my birthday and so I just didn’t. Until Todd convinced me that it would be so easy to forget our troubles by living it up in Europe for a bit.
Oh so easy.
Until it completely ruined my life.
I wish I had the luxury of simply not thinking about it, but I have to fix this as quickly as possible.
Thanks to some random dude, a chatty employee at the hotel I was about to be forcefully removed from, I joined a pilgrimage. Picture this: a hungover American, sans cellphone, with one of those cheap cinch bags on his back containing a few toiletries, leaving the Prague casino and just simply walking—for a month, mind you—to a castle in Germany. A literal castle in Germany. I camped with a Silicon Valley investor, a former model with a botched plastic surgery from Denmark, three retirees from South Africa, and a couple of Chilean teens doing a gap year before starting university.
I was already sort of punishing myself. I’m a long-distance runner, have been since I was a kid in elementary school. I thought I was in shape, but the blisters on every toe, the aching arches of my feet, and my sore knees combined to make my own version of hell.
I deserved that version of hell.
The whole experience wasn’t religious, but it was spiritual. I felt a little better when it was over. But my dad was still livid—heartbroken, really—and I was still unemployed.
And now the person I thought could help me refuses to do so.
I manage to make my way back to my car parked in the corner of the small parking lot, and I don’t run into any of my four brothers who now work here. Sebastian, the oldest and owner of Tate International. Oliver, second in command but opposite in personality from the serious Sebastian. Alec, a former football player now in charge of the amenities that a Colorado resort needs to provide. And, most recently, Henry, former Army-turned-elite security officer, now head of security for all of Sebastian’s resorts.
And then there’s me, the sole Tate son to work for our father and heir to Foundations Financial.
Well. Former heir.
The only son who hasn’t made up his mind about which side of the coin he’s on, our father’s or our oldest brother’s, is Milo, who just graduated from the university most of us went to: Columbia. He’s still in New York, finishing an internship in, what else? Business. Out of us six boys, only Henry and Alec didn’t major in something related to business, and somehow they’ve managed to make it back to the family business anyway.
Oh, and Dad recently discovered we have yet another brother, named Benson, older than all of us, born from a short-lived, college summer fling when my dad was in Florida before he met my mom.
So, yeah. That’s been interesting.
Thankfully, Benson is a nice guy.
I make my way out of the small parking lot and turn right onto Lakeside Road. No, I’m not driving the hour back to my home in Denver or into Longdale, a sleepy resort town teeming with people since it’s still tourist season for a couple more weeks.
I’m driving to my friend Steve’s place, high on the mountain above Longdale Lake. He and his wife, Meagan, are letting me stay there for a couple of days while I sort everything out. They’ve been spending some time in Italy, so yeah, I’m hiding out alone, away from it all. Being back in Denver was suffocating me—a constant reminder of all I’ve lost.
But also, I needed to be close to River Judkins. I thought she’d accept my offer of freelance work and that I could spend a couple of days hashing things out with her.
With pastures, pines, and quaking aspens on either side, I pass the house that Sebastian and Elianna built on the right. No one in the family even knew they were building it until they moved in. I cringe as I pass, hoping no one sees me driving by. I hadn’t realized my friend’s place was less than half a mile from his house, but there’s not much I can do about that now. I turn left and slowly pull into the long driveway. I’m relieved to see the house is set off from the road and hidden by a dense bundle of trees.
Steve called it “cozy.”
It is small, barely bigger than a tiny home. I whistle as I lift my luggage from the car and survey the house. The exterior, cream-colored stone and black, arched, double French front doors are something else. Steve’s brief description did not do it justice.
I enter through the garage around back and am hit by the sounds of the fountain built into the wall in the small mudroom with a stackable washer and dryer.
Oh yeah. Steve said he’d send some cleaners over to freshen up and turn on the fountain.
There’s a wall fountain in the mudroom. If that doesn’t give you an idea of how incredible this place is, I don’t know what would.
It’s just as well. If I’m here in Longdale to salvage my career, might as well do it in style, right? That’s got to help my mindset.
And yes, I know the latest trends in self-help because I listened to self-help audiobooks traveling back to the States after my pilgrimage, trying to cram a crash course of “How in the heck do I fix myself and my life?”
into my brain before returning to my dad.
I put down my bags, hang up the keys to my blue Ford Bronco—hey, I live in Colorado, it makes sense—on the dark stained, intricately carved wooden key hook hanging on the wall of the mudroom. I set the “World’s Best Dad”
medallion on the bench. After walking through the small kitchen and into the living room, I sink into one of the two matching love seats—soft as a cloud. It’s nice, except my mind won’t relax.
River Judkins refused to help me. It’s her prerogative, but why? It seemed almost personal.
I didn’t even have a chance to discuss how this would all work. She just flat-out refused me. Maybe I should have explained in greater detail about what happened—the compromising photos that made things look worse than they actually were. How trying to do a good thing in supporting my friend turned into a lapse of judgement with a high price to pay. Maybe I should go back and do just that. She wanted transparency, I’ll give her transparency.
But like she said, I was literally named after an angel. Of course, I’m not one. But I’ve played the part and lived with those expectations for so long, I don’t know how to not take on that persona. And those expectations don’t really have anything to do with my name but rather the ability I’ve had since childhood to connect with my dad, something that I realized as time went on is rare.
I’m wallowing when I hear a delicate, flutish sound. It takes until the third time before I realize it’s the doorbell. Who would be ringing the doorbell here? No one knows I’m in town except River Judkins, and it’s not like I gave her the address.
I heave myself off the sofa and approach the door, the inside of which is painted a complicated maze of twisting vines. It looks like it belongs in the Louvre. I manage to find a peephole in the design, cleverly disguised as a robin’s eye.
Sebastian is on my front doorstep, scowling.
Unbelievable.
Do I answer it? I wanted to get in and out of Longdale without my family knowing. Still, somehow, Sebastian seems to know and see all. Maybe River told him. Regardless, there’s really no way around this conversation now.
I open the door.
“Hey.”
Sebastian looks me over. His suit is as crisp as ever, and I feel that much more inferior. Downtrodden. Like that Depression-era “Forgotten Man” painting.
I am that guy—beaten down, sitting on a curb, without so much as my dignity in my hands.
“How did you know I was here?”
He doesn’t answer until he pushes past me and enters the house. He whistles in appreciation of the room and stands near the off-white marble fireplace, which is taller than us. What the house lacks in square footage, it makes up for in ceiling height, and the fireplace fills it all up.
He doesn’t sit. The thing with Sebastian is he’s so intense, he can’t dial things down. Marrying Elianna helped a little. But right now? He looks ready to explode.
“Did you forget that Henry works for me?”
Sebastian asks.
Ah. The security cameras.
I cross my arms over my chest. If he’s not sitting, I’m not, either. “Okay, so he saw me on the cameras. How did you find me?”
He doesn’t answer that. “What are you doing here? First you disappear for over a month and then you’re sneaking into my resort?”
When Sebastian refers to his resort, it reminds me just how on the outs I really am. I noticed early on while he was building his empire that he made a point to talk to our mother and my brothers like it was a family business. Sure, he was territorial in the sense that he took the brunt of the responsibility upon himself. Still, there was a sense of “us”
in the building of Tate International.
Except when it came to me. Probably because I worked for our father, who he was at odds with until recently. I don’t really know where they’re at in their relationship now. But I never felt a part of Tate International.
I wasn’t. I’ve been all-in on Dad’s finance company since even before I went to Columbia University. Still, it stings a little to hear the lines still being so harshly drawn.
“Yeah, I was in Europe,”
I say. “Clearing my head. Now I’m here for a couple of days. I needed to ask River Judkins if she would help me with something.”
I see the wheels turning in Sebastian’s head.
“And you can’t ask anyone at Foundations to do your PR for you because . . .”
It’s a leading question, and in an instant, I know he knows. At least some of it.
“Because I no longer work for them,”
I say, trying and failing to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “And this isn’t for the company. It’s for me.”
I shrug. “I figured if anyone knew how to help my public image, it would be River.”
Sebastian’s mouth is twisted severely to the side. “And what did she say?”
“Turned me down flat,”
I say with a sigh.
A bit of a smile curves Sebastian’s mouth and I’m feeling it again, that low churn of sadness, of being at odds with my oldest brother, of embarrassment that he likes that she refused to help.
“What happened, Gabriel?”
His voice is lower than before, and his eyes droop at the corners.
“Why don’t you tell me what you know, and I’ll decide if you need any other information?”
“Dad said you went on a bender in the Czech Republic, lost a bunch of money, got the investors’ panties in a bunch, and he had to let you go.”
Okay. Even now, it’s hard to hear it rattled off so succinctly like that, without explanations.
Or let’s call them what they are: excuses.
“Did he give you any ideas on how I can get my job back?”
“No.”
Sebastian’s eyebrows lift. “What are you going to do?”
I rub my palms together. They’ve suddenly grown cold. “I—I have to right all my wrongs, get my public image back to where it was. Then he’ll consider it.”
“Huh. And how long is that supposed to take?”
I hesitate. “At least a year, he says.”
“Very interesting.”
He slides his bottom jaw over to one side, chewing on his lip. And then, just like that, Sebastian’s already heading to the front door. I’m relieved. I don’t need his judgments right now. I don’t need his prying.
“Hey, if you have to hire River on as a freelancer for a bit, I’m fine with that.”
He reaches the door and turns back. “She’d do a good job. But I’m not sure it’s PR help that you need, and maybe that’s why she said no. Maybe the answer goes deeper than that.”
A dull throb starts behind my breastbone. Isn’t the answer always deeper than that? I’ll deal with those other things once I fix this.
“I need the investors and clients to know that what happened in Europe is never happening again,” I insist.
“Okay.”
His brows knit together. “Just . . . maybe take this year as an opportunity instead of a punishment. Take advantage of the time, you know?”
Advice from Sebastian is like watching our niece, Navie, trying to button up her coat by herself: endearing and frustrating.
I swallow. “Sounds good.”
Sebastian doesn’t know the half of it. He doesn’t understand the depths of what I have to do to restore the company’s image and get Dad to believe in me again.
Because he’s right. Cultivating a new public image would only go so far. Sure, it might help the board want to rehire me, eventually.
But the public eye isn’t my biggest concern. It’s my dad.
I’ve lost his trust, which means I’ve lost everything.
My dad has a certain way of looking at the world. He’s drilled into me from an early age the importance of marriage, of aligning myself with a woman with values to not only forge an image of security and stability but to anchor myself.
As rough as my parents’ marriage was for so long, he never wavered in his love for her or in his belief that she was the best thing to ever happen in his life.
A woman on your arm and in your ear, he’s said over and over again. A wife to show the world you’re “all good”
and to motivate you to be “all good.”
And as much as that’s always felt like an old-fashioned, probably unfair expectation, I know that’s what he believes to his core.
So, until I somehow meet the woman of my dreams and convince her to marry me, all I know to do is ask River for help with all the chatter, all the beliefs about me that have suddenly cropped up.
A sourness cuts down my throat.
And the selfies Todd took of us in Prague flash through my mind.
Please, Ms. Judkins, can you help me get rid of those, too?