Chapter Eight
Damon
His father summoned him upstate the following weekend, a request delivered through the estate's longtime housekeeper rather than a direct call, which was, Damon had learned over the years, how his father communicated whenever he wanted to establish that a conversation mattered enough to require formality but not so much that he'd admit to wanting it.
The drive took just under two hours, and Damon spent most of it thinking about Elena rather than the conversation ahead, a fact he noted with the same clinical distance he applied to most inconvenient truths about himself lately.
She'd asked to stay behind this weekend, citing Belmere site visits she needed to complete, though he suspected the real reason was a need for space from a marriage that had started, in the last two weeks, to feel less like an arrangement and more like something neither of them had fully consented to becoming.
The upstate roads gave way slowly from highway to the winding, tree lined lanes he remembered from childhood summers, before the company had consumed every available week of his calendar, back when his grandfather still drove him up here personally in an old Mercedes that smelled perpetually of pipe tobacco and cedar.
He passed the turnoff for the lake his grandfather used to take him fishing on, an activity Damon had never particularly enjoyed but had never once admitted to disliking, because his grandfather's quiet company on those mornings had been worth more to him than any fish they caught or failed to catch.
His father's estate came into view eventually, a rambling Federal style house set back from the road behind stone walls his great grandfather had built by hand, and Damon felt, as he always did approaching this house, the particular weight of a family history he'd never quite been able to set down long enough to examine honestly.
His father was waiting in the study when Damon arrived, seated in the leather chair that had become permanent since the stroke, a blanket across his knees despite the mild autumn weather, looking smaller than Damon remembered him being even a year ago.
"You look tired," his father said, by way of greeting.
"I run a company you built to require constant attention. Tired comes with the job."
"It didn't used to. You used to have more color in your face before all this." His father gestured vaguely, encompassing, Damon assumed, the marriage, the will clause, the entire apparatus of the last month. "Sit. I want to talk about your grandfather."
Damon sat, surprised, because his father rarely volunteered anything about the old man beyond the carefully edited version that made it into company history, competent founder, exacting standards, dead twelve years now and increasingly mythologized by everyone who'd worked under him.
"He was harder on me than you know," his father said, staring at some middle distance Damon couldn't follow.
"Harder than he ever was on you, actually, though I doubt that's much comfort.
He had opinions about how this company should grow, and I had different ones, and for most of my career he made it very clear which opinions he thought were correct. "
"The Belmere."
"Among other things, yes." His father's jaw tightened, an old, familiar tension Damon recognized from a hundred family dinners where the subject had come up in fragments, never fully.
"He thought the acquisition was beneath what this family should be.
I thought it was smart business, buying distressed assets at fair market value during a recession that would have crushed that hotel with or without our involvement.
We never agreed on that point, not once, not even at the end. "
Damon was quiet for a moment, letting his father's grief settle in the room rather than rushing to fill the silence with reassurance neither of them would have believed.
"Tell me about the appraisal itself. Everything.
I need to understand exactly what she's looking for before I decide how to handle it. "
His father's hands, resting on the blanket across his knees, tightened slightly.
"The city required an independent appraisal before the zoning variance would go through, standard procedure for a property of that historical designation.
I brought in a firm I'd worked with before, a man named Halloran, since retired, who understood exactly what number I needed the report to land on without my ever having to say it directly.
He valued the property at a figure roughly thirty percent below what an honest, aggressive comparison against similar historic hotels in the district would have supported.
Low enough that the acquisition looked defensible.
Low enough that the Marchettis, already drowning in debt from the recession, had no real leverage to negotiate a higher price. "
"That's fraud, not optimistic accounting."
"Legally, it's a gray area that would take a very expensive lawyer several years to argue either direction, and I've had very expensive lawyers standing by for over a decade in case anyone ever tried.
" His father's voice carried a bitterness that seemed directed more at himself than at Damon.
"Morally, you're right, and I've never once pretended otherwise to myself, whatever I've told the board or the press over the years.
I took advantage of a family in crisis because the law allowed me to dress the advantage up as due diligence.
That's the whole of it. I'd rather you hear the ugly version from me than a sanitized one from anyone else. "
"Does Julian know any of this."
"Julian knows there's something in the old files worth finding, because I made the mistake, years ago, in a moment of weakness I still regret, of telling him there was history in that acquisition he shouldn't go digging into.
Your cousin has never once in his life heard the word don't without immediately wanting to know why.
" His father's expression darkened. "I don't know how much he's pieced together on his own, or how much he's fed to that journalist directly versus simply pointed her in a useful direction and let her do the digging herself.
Either way, the appraisal exists, somewhere in an old records archive, and given enough time and the right subpoena, someone is eventually going to find it. "
Damon absorbed that in silence, thinking of Elena's father, the marble baseboard, the two years between the sale and his death that had apparently been enough to finish what the sale itself started.
"Why didn't you ever tell me this."
"Because you were building something, and I didn't see the use in handing you my guilt on top of everything else you were already carrying.
" His father's eyes, when they finally found Damon's, held something raw and unguarded that Damon had rarely seen in them.
"I'm telling you now because you've married into that guilt whether you intended to or not, and I think you deserve to know exactly what you're standing on top of before that journalist finds it for you and decides how the story gets told. "
"Mara Voss."
"Whatever her name is. Julian's been feeding her records requests for months, thinking I don't know, thinking your grandfather's old lawyer doesn't call me the moment anyone goes digging through that acquisition's paperwork.
" A thin, humorless smile crossed his father's face.
"Your cousin has always underestimated how many people in this family are still loyal to something other than him. "
"What does she have."
"Enough to make the story uncomfortable.
Not enough, yet, to prove fraud outright, if the appraiser's original notes are handled carefully.
" His father studied him carefully. "I'm telling you this because I think you should decide, now, before it becomes urgent, whether you're the kind of man who handles it carefully, or the kind who lets the truth out on his own terms before someone else forces it out on theirs. "
Damon sat with that for a long time, the study quiet around them except for the old clock on the mantel his grandfather had wound every morning without fail for thirty years.
He thought about Elena, standing in the Belmere's grand salon crying without deciding to, about Franco remembering her as a child, about the specific, unbearable weight of an entire family's collapse resting on an appraisal his own father had signed off on knowing it wasn't quite honest.
"I need to think about what I owe her," Damon said finally. "Not the board. Not Julian. Elena, specifically. About whether she deserves to hear this from me before she finds it some other way."
"That's the first thing you've said today that sounds like your grandfather instead of me.
" His father's voice carried something Damon rarely heard in it, something close to approval, though laced with an old, tired grief that never seemed to fully leave him anymore.
"For what it's worth, for whatever it's worth coming from me, I think you married someone with more integrity than either of us managed to hold onto over the years we spent building this company.
Don't waste that. I wasted quite a lot in my life thinking integrity was a luxury I couldn't afford.
I'd rather you not make the same mistake at thirty five that I only understood I'd made at seventy two. "
Damon didn't have an answer for that, and his father didn't seem to expect one, and they sat together in the quiet study for a while longer, two men who'd built their entire relationship around efficiency and unspoken things, finally sitting with one unspoken thing dragged, however partially, into the light between them.