1. Helen
The start of summer in the Wasatch Front is literally the only time it becomes even a little bit habitable. I mean, sure, New York City gets cold, but other than walking from your brownstone to a cab, you’re never exposed to the elements for long.
This entire area’s just rotten with outdoors. In fact, it’s the only thing that draws new people, usually, and the tourists who come to see the Flaming Gorge barely spend any time inside, so having the weather warm enough that the mounds of snow melt and the sunshine actually warms your face is absolutely lovely.
All the mud that squishes and squelches everywhere, because the horses and cows that everyone else seems to love greedily gobble up anything at all that tries to grow, isn’t quite so wonderful. Still, when Abby told me that Amanda and Mandy had both already signed the contracts and that I could come pick them up, I knew she’d probably be outside, so I wasn’t even annoyed when that’s where I found her.
I’ve been staying with Ethan at the Brooks ranch—I stuck around when Steve and Abigail moved to a remodeled version of Steve’s house—and it’s a little lonely if I’m being honest. Ethan’s gone all the time. He’s either out with cows or he’s preoccupied with Beth. Even when he’s around, he’s not much for elevated conversation, in spite of my best efforts.
I honestly wonder sometimes how Abigail and her relatively intelligent first husband Nathan created a kid like Ethan. He’s not dumb, but he’s so unmotivated. His hopes and dreams couldn’t even fill a salt shaker—and most of them, he’s already realized at the age of nineteen, right here in this cowtown. I just don’t understand how a person could be that satisfied. What does he strive for?
Nothing. That’s what.
“Oh, you’re here.” Abigail smiles and waves from where she’s standing along the split rail fence. The baby on her hip turns toward me and smiles a gummy grin. For some reason that no one has been able to explain to me, they have to tell people how old he is in weeks. Thankfully, I’ve broken their code, so I know that he’s six months old as of last week. It’s a decent age—he’s young enough that no one tries to fob him off on the women who know nothing and have no interest in babies, but he’s old enough that he can sit up on the floor and play with things to keep him from crying. He’s young enough he can’t talk your ear off with inane babble yet, and old enough to chew on soft objects as his teeth come in. That’ll happen any day now, hopefully. I find his gummy smile a little disturbing, if I’m being honest.
But most importantly, he holds his head up on his own.
The few times I’ve been forced to hold him, I was always terrified that his neck would give out and his head would just roll right off his shoulders. Baby-holding should come with some kind of mandatory neck-cradling training. Anyone who hasn’t had that training yet should never be allowed to touch them.
“Where did you say the contracts are?” I’m being polite. I’ve been here more than a minute already and she still hasn’t told me.
“They’re doing some work on the closet in the master, so I had to put them in that cabinet beside the microwave so no one would spill anything on them or, you know, use them as an oversized coaster.”
I can’t help pulling a face. I do occasionally get a little lonely living with Ethan after staying with Abby for a while, but it’s the lesser of two evils for sure. Her house exists in a perpetual state of barely managed chaos. “Well, I’ll go rummage around until I find them, trying not to get in the way of the cabinet people.”
When I glance up, I see why Abigail’s waiting on the fence line.
As usual, if Steve’s not at the hospital, he’s on a huffing and puffing horse. This one appears to be young or stupid or both, because it keeps trying to rear back. Meanwhile, Emery, Izzy, and Whitney are doing something quite strange, making serpentine, twisty, follow-the-leader back and forth movements from one end of the arena to the other.
“That’s the wrong lead again, Emery,” Steve says, already sounding a bit winded himself. “Why do you girls think that she keeps getting the wrong lead on a horse who knows them?”
“It’s because she’s letting his shoulder collapse,” Izzy says. “That’s also why her turns are so wide they almost crash into the rest of us.”
Emery looks ready to cry.
Steve’s talking to her rather sternly now, which is probably for the best, and he’s stopped riding, which means he thinks something major is wrong. Either that, or he senses an upcoming meltdown. “Izzy, keep your eyes forward. If you don’t look where you’re going, you’ll wind up way off when it matters. You can’t look at the ground and hope to find your destination.”
Emery starts moving again, and she looks fine to me. At least her turns are sharper.
“That’s still the wrong lead. That’s what? Thirteen times, now?” Steve sounds a little annoyed. “That horse knows his leads cold, Em.”
And now she’s bawling. Loudly.
Thankfully, it’s not my circus and not my monkeys. I turn to walk off when Steve’s reddish horse decides to bite the back of Whitney’s dark brown one, and Whitney’s horse bolts—without her on its back.
Abigail exhales. “Here.”
Before I know how to say no, she’s thrusting her drooling, gummy-mouthed baby at me and ducking between the rails of the fence. “Whitney, are you alright?”
As if he’s figured out that Whitney’s fine and an amateur now has him, baby Nate scowls at me. Then, predictably, his entire face turns bright red and he starts to howl. “Ma-ma!” He’s reaching and twisting for Abigail like someone gave him water after midnight. Or was the no-no food after midnight and water poured directly on him?
Either way, I’m literally holding a gremlin straight out in front of me, and I strongly consider just setting him down on the ground. If it wasn’t quite so muddy between me and the edge of the arena, I might do it. I’ve seen him sitting up on his own in the family room. He’d be up to the task.
But Abigail’s still talking to Whitney, who’s now standing and brushing off her pants.
“I’m sorry,” Steve’s saying. “I’ve never seen Danke bite before so I wasn’t expecting it.”
“It’s fine.” Whitney nods. “I can get back on.”
Unfortunately, in spite of her reassurance, it takes them several more minutes to calm the dumb brown horse down enough for Whitney to swing back on—which you could not pay me enough to do—and my shoulders are well and truly sore by the time Abigail finally starts back toward me. My ears are also quite sick of the screaming.
“Here.” She’s not quite through the gate yet, but I hold the little nightmare out and bounce him a little so he knows she’s coming.
Abigail stops short of the rails and smirks. “I’m sorry, but do my eyes deceive me? Or is the great Helen Fisher distressed about having to hold a baby for three minutes?”
“Was it only three minutes? I’m not sure I’ve heard that much crying in my entire life.”
Abigail’s laughing as she swings through the fence and takes little Nate back. Being demon spawn, he immediately collapses against her chest and sighs, like I was somehow abusing him. “It would help if you held him more like an acquisition agreement and less like a sack of moldy potatoes.”
He smells more like the potatoes, but I’m feeling generous, so I don’t point that out. “It must be less stressful taking care of a child once you get used to doing it.”
Abigail shrugs. “Not really, but you get used to the stress, like someone with a chronic ulcer becomes accustomed to the burning feeling.”
“Like you know anything at all about ulcers.” Marrying a doctor has expanded her analogy repertoire, at least.
“I probably know as much as you do about children.” She’s still smirking as she walks with me into the house. “You’re around someone who has one, at least.”
It’s a good thing she comes with me, because the contracts are not in the cabinet I thought she was talking about. There are very few people in the world whose company I enjoy, and Abigail is one of them, but spending time with her is way less fun when she’s shackled to a drool factory who poops his pants on the regular.
“Steve’s off tomorrow,” she says. “I can meet you to go over the documents on that seed deal first thing.”
That seed deal.
It’s such a typically Abigail way to refer to a multi-million dollar deal that I’m smiling as I leave. That seed deal, as she calls it, is the newest hostile takeover that I’ve been scouting, and I’m more excited about it than I have been about anything in a while.
Vitality Plus, a relatively new agricultural startup company I’ve been looking into, was backed by Gonzago, which is one of the largest global food engineering and production companies in the world. Lately, it has come under increasingly uncomfortable fire for some of its reverse engineering practices, and it’s taken a beating in both the media and to its bottom line.
It’s been bad enough that it cut a few of its pet projects loose, and now they’re all floundering. I love to look for baby ducks whose mother has lost track of them, and this certainly qualifies. Without consistent revenue to fund its growth through new research, Vitality Plus had to make an IPO that didn’t go well, just to stay in operation. In spite of its early shove into maturity, it has consistently turned a profit. It’s in a reasonably good position, but thanks to a few ongoing management blunders, it’s worth less than half what it could be worth, and if its pending tech breaks through?
It’ll be meteoric.
It’s an investment someone else made that they dropped on the ten-yard line, and I can’t wait to snatch it out from under their nose. I’m practically salivating, thinking about how much easy money I stand to make. I’ve been buying up shares from a dozen different holding companies, and inside of another week, I’ll have enough to make a decent proffer. I don’t usually go for takeovers by proxy, because proxy fights can get ugly fast. If they go wrong, they wind up costing even more than an up-front purchase offer, but in this case, with Gonzago holding onto so many Vitality Plus shares, it’s probably my only play.
The worst part of a proxy fight is meeting with all the major stakeholders and feeling them out without tipping my hand. I’ve done my research, and I know quite a lot about one of the biggest. Even so, it’s almost impossible to really know what the people you’re petitioning want until they’re right in front of you. I like to go in with every angle covered, and that’s just not possible in this circumstance. It makes me uneasy.
I’m about to get on the plane to head for Los Angeles for the meeting when my phone buzzes.
CAN YOU SWING BY BEFORE YOU LEAVE? David never asks like that. He’ll say he misses me. He’ll tell me that he can’t wait to see me again. But he never asks me to “swing by,” because he knows that it’s a thirty-minute drive each way to his resort in Dutch John. In this area, most things are five to ten minutes—but he put down roots a half an hour away. It’s irksome.
I want to tell him that I’m already heading out, but he knows I own the jet. It’ll leave when I tell it to leave, and he knows it. I mentally groan, but I change directions and head for his place instead of the local hangar.
I’m reviewing the basics of my position for tomorrow morning’s meeting as I drive, and I feel pretty confident that I can sway Mr. McFarland. I’ve never met him in person, and it took us three weeks to track him down, but I’m prepared to make him an excellent offer. I’m confident he’ll either sell me his shares, or agree to vote my way if and when I call for a vote of no confidence.
After all. . .who wouldn’t prefer to bring in Tom Brady over Eli Manning, really? Not that I know a lot about sports, but I try to keep important figures straight so I can understand the guy talk that permeates the boardrooms.
When I reach David’s resort, the staff wave as I waltz through the door, except for the men with earpieces—they nod and smile. I jog up the steps in an attempt to get some movement in before sitting on a plane all day, and then I hang a right around the corner to his office, entering the code to walk through the otherwise locked stairwell door.
I always walk through this way—not to take him off guard anymore, but because it’s the quickest way to reach his hippie cubicle space.
“Ms. Foster,” David’s assistant Ysandre says with a curt nod. “Mr. Park is currently in the conference room.”
I sigh and spin on my heel, thinking about the first time I came and how different it feels to visit now. But when I walk into the conference room, a rush of adrenaline floods my system just like it did that first day when I stormed his resort, looking for blood.
Because David’s not alone.
If I’m not mistaken, the people waiting for me in that conference room with him, shocked expressions on their faces, are his parents.