Chapter 25 #2
Courtney holds her arms out in invitation, and I find the strength to stand up and hug her tightly.
She hugs me back, and in her arms, I find the ability to release.
The tears start slowly, and I never devolve into full on sobbing, but with each hot tear, Courtney hugs me tighter.
For the first time in our lives, she’s the one supporting me and I’m the one needing strength and comfort.
It’s a short storm, a summer squall of the agony I’m in, but it helps. When I’m done, Courtney wipes her thumb under my eyes like Mom used to before standing on her tiptoes to kiss my forehead, again, just like Mom.
“Thanks. I think. Though let’s never discuss this again,” I say awkwardly. I sigh and straighten my spine, falling back into my comfortable role. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Work with Kaede on the damage control letter. I’m going to talk with Dad.”
“You sure?” Courtney asks.
I nod, adjusting my tie a little. “Yeah. The sooner, the better. No use in prolonging this and letting others control my destiny. I did that for too long.”
I leave Courtney and Kaede and head upstairs to my father’s office.
He’s here too, of course. Most of the senior management’s dealing with the PR fallout of yesterday’s insanity.
They all want to be here, both for the good of the company and because everyone loves to see the prince taken down a notch.
I can feel their watchful eyes—curious, amused, shocked, angry.
But yet, they work to minimize the impact, even if the majority of the responsibility is sitting on my shoulders, and everyone is waiting for Dad to decide what he’s going to do.
But professionally, I still don’t care. Yeah, I don’t want Kaede, or Courtney, or anyone in the company to be hurt or lose their jobs because of this, but as for me?
I don’t care. This corporation’s in good hands with Dad in charge, and if the future of this place doesn’t involve me . . . I can live with that. I don’t want it to come to that, but it’s not the most important thing in my life right now.
Violet is. She’s all I care about.
Dad’s sitting behind his desk when I walk in, his face still thundery. “Dad?”
“I assume Courtney found you?” Dad says, his voice so tight that I’m afraid he’ll snap a tooth if he bites his words off any harder.
“She did. I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“So you’ve said. But sorry won’t cut it this time. Do you even realize what you’ve done?” he growls, slamming his hand to his desk as he rises to his feet, pacing about the room.
“I’ve got board members yelling about stock prices, which have dropped by eighteen percent in the last twenty-four hours.
That’s people’s lives, Ross! Their life savings shot because of your shenanigans.
The shareholders are bitching about morality clauses, demanding my own son’s dismissal from the company I started from nothing.
I’ve got lawyers calling, police calling, and the media .
. .” He shakes his head. “The fucking media! Showing that sniveling shit Radcliffe on the news first thing this morning. And it’s trending on social media too.
Congrats, you’ve gone viral,” he says sarcastically.
“Dad—” I say, trying to get a word in edgewise, but he’s on a roll.
“What is it your mother calls them? Culture vultures? They smell blood in the water and they’re hunting like sharks, hunting you, Son. And what am I to do about it?”
“Nothing,” I say sharply. “Let me fix this. I’m the one who fucked up. Let me fix it. At least I can drown myself in work and be useful for something.”
Dads laughs tersely. “You? Fix this? This whole thing is your mess, as always.”
I grit my teeth. “It’s never my mess! It’s you believing those parasites and the tales they make up over your own son.
So what if I wasn’t ready to settle down and get married?
It wasn’t your place to force me to do it, regardless of why you did it and whether your reasons were well-intentioned or not.
” It’s the smallest give that I have, based on what Courtney told me about Dad’s thinking process and what he wants for my future.
“I didn’t force you to lie to everyone. You did that all on your own, didn’t you?” he booms.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say that it was Abi’s idea, just to show him that I’m not the only one who thinks he’s gone too far. But I can’t. I won’t throw my sister under the bus that way.
But Dad heard the video and knows that conversation was between Violet and Abi. I can see the moment he remembers that.
“And you got your sister involved in this too!”
Fine, if that’s how we’re doing this, then so be it.
“You know as well as I do that no one mixes Abi up in anything she doesn’t want to get mixed up in. She’s as hard-headed as you are.” It’s not a compliment, but he smiles slightly as if it is. “She knew you were pressuring me, she knew Violet needed this, and she put one and one together.”
“Except she came up with three, and we’re all paying the price.”
“No one is paying the price more than Violet,” I remind him, which sobers us both from the war of words we’re engaging in.
It’s a dash of cold water on both of our tempers. “We are never going to see eye to eye on this, so what do you want me to do? How do we move forward from where we are now?”
He sits down in his chair, his face stoic as he returns to the all-business mode he’s known for. “The company is putting out a press release, you will write an apology letter, the lawyers will do what we pay them to do, and the company will ride this out.”
“And us?” I say.
He sighs, turning in his chair to look out the window, so similar to what I did to Courtney just moments ago. “You should go visit your mother.”
I know a dismissal when I hear one. I swallow thickly and turn on my heel, leaving Dad to deal with the company he loves, to repair the image he cares about.
He wants me to settle down, have a family, be the two-dot-oh version of him, but right now, I feel like his family is the last thing Dad cares about.
A tiny voice in the back of my head tries to remind me of all the times Dad was there for me, teaching me about the company I begrudge him for loving, throwing spirals in the yard when I was just a pee-wee football player, and showing me how to love by treating Mom well.
But I can’t, not now when we’ve been ripped apart at the seams that used to hold us together.
I do a quick check-in with Kaede and Courtney, who are working on the apology draft, to tell them where I’m headed. Courtney wishes me luck, saying that as mad as Dad is, Mom is more hurt.
“She really believed you and was so happy for you. She was already thinking about what she wanted your kids to call her. I think she’d settled on Lolly but was still talking Dad into going for Pop.”
Guilt blooms afresh.
I climb into my Camaro and drive out to the estate. There’s media both just outside the parking garage of the office and at the gate to the house, but a pair of sunglasses and a cranked-up radio help me ignore them.
Karl greets me at the front door, his face tense but professional. “You doing okay, Karl?”
“They are respecting the property lines, sir. I wish they’d respect a few more lines, but that’s beyond my powers,” he says. “Your mother is in her library.”
Mom’s library is the equivalent of Dad’s study.
It’s her ‘cave’, the place she gets to do whatever she wants and express her tastes however she wants.
You’d expect a library to be all dark woods and expensive tomes, but you’d be so very wrong.
She’s turned it into the epitome of old-school femininity, with patterned lace wallpaper, pale rose-colored crown moldings, and a bunch of books with covers I’d rather not think about my mother reading.
It’s safe to say this is my least favorite room in the house.
I find Mom sitting on her white loveseat in loungewear, even though it’s late afternoon, which is unlike her. She’s staring out the window that faces the garden, a cup of tea on a saucer next to her. As I close the door, she turns around, and I stop, shocked.
Somehow, my mother’s aged ten years overnight. Normally, she looks a good decade younger than she actually is.
Now, though, the woman looking up at me is a wreck. She looks shattered, her face lined with wrinkles that weren’t there yesterday, her eyes puffy and red, and I have to blink to convince myself that the gray I see in her hair is sunlight and not gray.
“Why?”
Only one word, but it breaks me more than all of Dad’s ranting and Courtney’s browbeating. Her voice is a cracked, paper-thin parody of the soft voice that I grew up listening to, the cool balm to Dad’s bluster.
“I wish I had a good reason,” I finally admit, unable to hold up to Mom’s pleading eyes. “We never meant for it to happen like this. We didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
Mom’s soft smile says that even the consequences we don’t intend are ours to bear.
“When you came to me saying you were marrying Violet, I remembered an old dream I had,” Mom says vacantly, looking out the window again. “It was soon after Abigail and Violet became friends, and she’d invited Violet over for a sleepover.”
“Which time? She was always over here.” The attempt at lightness falls flat as Mom cuts her eyes back to me.
Mom takes another sip of her tea and nods.
“She was. But this time, you spent all day being the most annoying pain in the ass a big brother could be. When the girls wanted to swim, you complained they were splashing too much. When they played inside, you complained they were too loud and disrupting your homework. You, of all people, complaining about being able to do homework.”
“If I remember right, you said I could sleep outside then.”
Mom nods. “And that night, when you’d gotten your sleeping bag arranged in Abigail’s treehouse, I noticed something.
From this window, I could see both your and Abi’s rooms, and you were looking up there at Violet.
And I just had this vision, a dream. I brushed it off at the time, though I did wonder when you two would fight so fiercely through high school.
Love and hate are such a thin line, and you lost interest in everyone else so readily, but never Violet.
And the engagement brought it back around. ”
“I’m sorry, Mom. Truly, but I’m going to make this right.”
“How?” Mom asks, her eyes starting to water. “How can you make it right?”
“I don’t know,” I admit honestly, “but I’m going to.
” I reach out and take her hand, “Mom, it started out because I was trying to get Dad off my back and because Violet wanted to do right by Papa. But over the last two weeks, or maybe you’re right and it started long ago .
. . but when I stood up there yesterday, I meant every word I said to Violet. ”
Mom looks at me hopefully, swallowing. “You mean . . . ?”
“I mean I’ve got some things to do, some people to talk to . . . maybe some asses to kick, and a few lumps to take.”
Mom smiles and stands up. “Then go take care of them.”