Chapter Thirty-Three
Dad has gained a few pounds. Even though I couldn’t tell just by looking at him, I can feel it when I lean on his shoulder—something I haven’t done in what feels like an eternity. But by the time I reach the part of the story where we’re at LAX and Liam pulls me aside, making our last interaction also a transaction, Dad gusts out a breath and urges me to rest my head there while I finish the whole saga.
It feels amazing to physically lean on my dad again.
“This was quite a trip, kiddo,” he says.
“No kidding.”
“I wish you had told me the truth, but I understand.”
“I know. It just sounded so sleazy.”
“Well, did you fall for him?”
I shrug, but my heart wails out a soggy yes.
“He doesn’t sound evil,” Dad says quietly. “Just broken.”
“Very broken. I keep thinking about how he didn’t grow up with a David Green, and how incredibly lucky I am that I did.”
Dad’s hand comes to my knee, squeezing, and I look down at the scars there. So many IVs have gone into the back of his big, strong hand that it looks like a battlefield even though it’s been forever since anything went in that way. His central port now lives on his chest, and I learned about an hour ago that we have a tentative date for its removal—six months from now. It’s a hard-fought victory. Vivi even put up a countdown calendar on the wall.
“You think he’s too broken?” Dad asks.
I run my fingers over the back of his hand. “Too broken for what?”
“Too broken for you to love him, dummy.”
I tilt my face to look up at him. “You want me to stick with Liam? After he secretly bought my paintings?”
Dad shrugs like he doesn’t agree with my level of offense over this. “When we care about someone, they deserve the benefit of the doubt. We have to consider not only what they did, but also why they did it. Intent matters,” he says, and the wisdom he’s shared with me my entire life yanks me right back to Singapore and that cursed hotel room and the anguish in Liam’s eyes when he insisted that he and his father were not the same.
And only now does it occur to me that my suggestion that they were probably pushed him even further toward his shitty decision.
I growl out a frustrated breath. “He took a job with Mephistopheles,” I say. “Literally the worst possible choice.”
“He’s backed into a corner, Annie.”
I narrow my eyes. “David Green, are you Team West?”
Dad shakes his head, laughing. “I just want what’s best for you, and when you were talking about your time on the island, you had that Anna Glow. You never talk about guys this way with me.”
“It’s awkward, huh?”
He laughs again. “It’s not awkward. I like it.” He kisses my forehead. “It’s possible that he has some family stuff that is more complicated than you realize. It sounds like he grew up with money, but not much else. It doesn’t have to stay romantic between you, but you are legally married to him and will have to deal with that eventually.” He smiles at my groan. “I just think, give it a few days and then reach out to him. See if he’s okay.”
“Okay.”
It’s where we leave it for the night.
“Mind if I crash here?” I ask.
“Course not.”
I took a cab directly from the airport to see him and unload to my safest of safe spaces. It’s restorative, being back in my childhood home, but it’s after one; I’m exhausted and Dad is up later than he probably has been in two years. Standing, I help him up, get him sorted through his nighttime routine and tucked in like a kid instead of a grumpy fifty-year-old swatting me away. I kiss the top of his bald head through his ever-present beanie and linger at the door. “I’m glad to be home with you,” I tell him.
“Vivi’s a better cook,” he answers, and smiles at me just before I turn off the light and do everything I can to not worry about Liam going home to an empty house, Liam not having a David Green, Liam facing all of this alone.
VIVI A BETTER COOKthan me? Yeah, right!
I’ve planned to have pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs ready for Dad, and when he walks into the kitchen around nine the next morning, that’s exactly what he gets.
Mostly.
“What’s this?”
“Breakfast,” I say, offended.
Dad sits at the breakfast bar, pulling the plate closer and sniffing it.
I used up all the eggs for the scramble that I overcooked and had to toss, and then forgot baking powder entirely in the batter, so without both ingredients, the pancakes are a little thin but obviously recognizable as pancakes. I huff out a breath.
Dad points at the bacon, looking up at me. “What happened?”
“I thought you liked crispy bacon.”
He grins. “This is bacon?”
I pull the plate away, saying, “Okay, Mr. Picky,” and pull out plan B: the doughnuts I DoorDashed from Winchell’s right after I burned the first batch of bacon.
“Now we’re talking.” Dad digs into the box and takes an enormous bite of a maple bar. I’m so happy to see him with an appetite that I can’t even pretend to be offended anymore. He glances down at the counter and then nods to me. “Viv’s calling,” he says through a mouthful. “Probably to tell you that burned food will give me cancer.”
“Oh my God,” I bark, horrified, snatching the plate and dumping everything into the trash. “That’s not funny!”
Dad laughs anyway and I give him the finger (my ring finger! It’s my dad!) and pick up the phone, swiping to answer. “Vivs! Hey!”
“Turn on the news,” she says.
Humor drains out of me at her flat tone. “What?”
“Turn it on. Turn on CNN.”
I jog into the living room, digging through the throw pillows on the couch to find Dad’s remote. “Dad, how do I turn on the news?” I ask, flailing.
“What?” he calls.
“The news! I don’t watch news! I just watch clips like five days later on Twitter. Help me!”
“Just turn on the TV.”
I hit a few buttons, finally ending up on an Apple TV menu that has nothing that looks at all newsy. I let out a garbled roar.
He walks in, taking the remote from me and laughing. A few seconds later, CNN is up and I’m staring in shock at the headline on the chyron:
Breaking News: Weston Foods Heir Apparent Liam Weston Stalked and Harassed Female Employees.
I don’t realize I’m sitting until the coffee table is beneath me. “Vivs, I gotta go,” I say, and drop my phone somewhere beside me.
“What’s this?” Dad asks, as Liam’s photo from the Stanford faculty website appears.
“Your son-in-law,” I say, and turn up the volume. “And… I don’t know.”
“Just eleven years ago,” Victor Blackwell is saying, “Liam Weston was embroiled in a scandal centered around the technology he developed for the company, called PISA, or Product Inventory Surveillance and Alignment. And now,” the anchor says dramatically, “it appears the scandal went deeper than anyone knew. We’ll get into it, after the break.”
I lean in, shouting at the TV. “What? No! This is no time for commercials!”
“Wait… I remember this,” Dad says quietly, and I look over at him while sports heroes enthusiastically crunch Doritos on the television. “There was some genius kid who created a program that was meant to keep track of inventory within the grocery network, but he programmed it to track employee activity, too.”
“What?” I ask. “That Liam programmed?”
“Yeah. If I remember correctly, the program started combing emails or something? I think there was some big employment lawsuit, but I don’t remember the details.”
I wave him to shush as the anchor returns on-screen, and the panel splits to show a woman standing outside a giant Weston Foods gate.
“We’re going to CNN’s Stephanie Elam now, who’s covering the story for us in Irvine, California. Stephanie, what can you tell us about the situation?”
“Well, Victor,” she says, “the details are still emerging but here’s what we know: Back in 2013, a lawsuit was brought against Weston Foods by a regional manager named Kasey Bellingham, who alleged she had been unlawfully passed over for promotion. Bellingham—a model employee by every internal metric—claimed she was up for promotion and denied at a performance review where her pregnancy was mentioned by her manager. According to Bellingham, she had never told anyone at the company that she was pregnant but had sent an email to a personal friend using her private email account on a work computer. The matter was settled out of court, and a legal spokesperson for the family explained at the time that the PISA software, designed by the son of CEO Raymond Weston, had been improperly used to track employee communications. This son, a minor at the time of the software launch in 2010, has been identified as William Weston, currently a professor of economics and cultural anthropology at Stanford. What we’ve learned today from an anonymous series of documents leaked to CNN is that the surveillance went much deeper than emails and was, in several cases, used to stalk and sexually harass female employees at the company.”
I press my hand to my mouth, shaking my head. Everything about this feels wrong. “No way. No way.” I look up at my dad, my heart sprinting out of my chest. “That can’t be right. Dad, this isn’t Liam, there’s no way this is right.”
Dad lifts his chin for me to keep watching, but I’m already dialing Liam’s number. It immediately goes to a message saying the voicemail is full. Hanging up, I start scrolling, stopping on the only other Weston I have. But it’s not Reagan who answers, it’s Blaire.
“Hello?”
I launch myself from the table, pacing the room while this local correspondent continues to discuss the terrible, impossible, devastating things Liam is accused of doing. “Oh my God, Blaire. What the hell is happening?”
“Well, hello, pretty little liar.” There’s a smile in her voice, no heat, but I can picture the sharp, teasing glint in her eye.
“Okay, listen. I wanted to tell you everything. I really did, but for reasons that I think are now incredibly obvious, I couldn’t.”
“Oh, honey, I think you mispronounced ‘I was paid to lie my ass off.’?” She laughs. “Which, honestly, I can respect. But goddammit, Anna, I was excited to have a friend in this mess of crazy.”
“You do have a friend,” I promise her. “I’ll take you out for a full margarita bar, Taco Tuesday, whatever, as soon as humanly possible, but you have to tell me what’s going on.”
She pauses. “I take it you’re watching the news.”
“Yes! What is this?”
“This, sugar, is Raymond Weston going for blood.”
“But why Liam’s blood? Didn’t he take the job?”
“Alex isn’t home yet, so I’m not sure, but I presume this means he did not,” she says.
I stare at the television, digesting this while my heart crawls into my windpipe. Another photo of Liam is shown on-screen, this one from when he’s younger; he looks barely out of his teens, but the chyron reads, Female Weston employees pressured into sharing personal photos.
“What?” I ask, reeling. “He didn’t take the CEO position?”
“Based on your question, am I to understand that you aren’t with him right now?”
“No. We had an argument and I think we ended things.” I feel the lump in my throat expand. “And now his phone is going straight to voicemail, and he won’t reply to my texts.”
Blaire lets loose a long sigh. “All these years and I knew this would come back around.”
“Will you tell me what it is, Blaire? Is this how Ray screwed Liam over?”
“Were you so busy fucking that boy six ways to Sunday that he never told you about the shit Ray pulled? Damn,” she says, smacking her lips. “This tastes like envy.”
“Can you please just… focus? I’m standing here watching the news say that Liam used software he created to spy on and sexually harass female Weston’s employees and I cannot believe he would ever do that.”
“Well,” Blaire says simply, “then don’t.”
Relieved, I crumple down onto the couch. “Okay.”
“I’m really not supposed to be talking about this. Ray paid a shit ton of money to have it scrubbed from Google searches, but I guess the talking heads never forget.” I hear the click of spiked heels against tiled floors, and the soft sound of a door being closed. “So, if someone asks, you didn’t get this from me, but here we go: PISA—it’s an acronym for the program Liam built while he was in school—was only ever meant to monitor inventory across stores,” she says. “It was a great idea, really. The entire goal of it was to reduce food waste.” My chest seizes at this, an inward, protective growl. “But when Ray wanted more ‘transparency in his employees’ activities,’?” she says, and I hear the leaning air quotes in her words, “Liam did what Daddy said and modified the software to not only track ordering systems, but to log specific keywords in all of the programs, including emails. Kasey was just the start of it.” She hums, as if thinking this through. “Really, Kasey was the most minor of all the cases. But she was the first and went public before they figured out how to keep it under wraps. At the time, it was easier for the stockholders to forgive a reckless teenage boy for being naughty than a CEO for being a letch.”
“So it was never Liam doing this, right?”
“Oh God, no. Liam just handed the program over to IT and went away to college. Ray was the one spying. Ray was the one starting up conversations with employees, making them feel special for becoming friendly with the CEO, and eventually pressuring them to send him photos or share personal information.”
My stomach sinks. “How old was Liam when all this happened?”
“Let’s see. He developed the software when he was fifteen to maybe seventeen? And the scandal broke about three years later. I think he was twenty. Twenty-one. Thereabouts. God, he was gorgeous. All that pent-up—”
“Blaire.”
“Sorry,” she says, and laughs. “He was a minor when he created it, so it’s why his name generally wasn’t used in any of the stories. After Kasey came forward, all hell broke loose behind the scenes. God, the number of lawsuits they must have settled out of court. I can’t even imagine.”
“If they’re settled, why did Ray even do this?”
“Because he’s pissed as hell and a lunatic,” she says, like I’m very stupid. “I bet that fucker dumped a ton of stock so he won’t feel the pain of this in his portfolio, either.”
And I guess I am very stupid, because I cannot fathom a human this petty and terrible. I feel my jaw slowly drop. “I’m sorry, you mean he really did this because he’s mad Liam won’t do what he says?”
“Ray is a first-class narcissist, Anna. Are you just now figuring that out?”
“But Liam is his son.”
Blaire barks out a laugh. “It’s honestly sweet the way you think that matters at all.”
“In most families, it matters a lot,” I reply.
“Janet always says Liam was her thinker. Imagine a boy who, at fifteen, conceives of a system that could be successfully implemented for a NASDAQ-traded company. If I’m honest, I think it intimidated Ray a little. God knows Liam intimidated me.” She lowers her voice. “You’ve seen the way Ray is with the guys. He’s always been like that, thinks he’s toughening them up. It works with Alex, but Liam never fell into line. If you ask me, that’s what Ray hates and respects the most in Liam. He doesn’t bend. And if Liam turned him down for this job?” She whistles.
I look back at the television. The chyron has been updated again—Stanford University releases statement: “Liam Weston is a promising young professor. We are launching a full probe into these allegations.”
What a mess.
I start pacing again. “Why doesn’t Liam just come out and tell the truth? That it was Ray behind all the messages?”
“Because all of the communication was sent from an admin account. Ray can easily shrug and say he’s an old grocery man who doesn’t even know which button turns on the monitor. And Liam did create the software. He did enable the surveillance.”
“Fuck,” I whisper.
“Between you and me,” Blaire says, “I wasn’t one bit surprised when he started that foundation.”
“Oh, right. He mentioned that. What is it exactly?”
“He set up an endowment for Weston employees.”
My gaze locks, unseeing, on the television as I process this. “An endowment?”
“Yeah, so anyone at the company can apply for a grant to take a class, go to college, travel, or purchase a home. Basically, he’s trying to rebuild the culture in his own way, on the outside.” While my mind blanks of everything but overwhelming adoration for Liam, Blaire cups her hand over the phone and hollers out to the kids in the background. When she comes back, she says, “His entire inheritance is going into it. It’s all anonymous, as far as I know, but he’s had IT put the link to the application right on the website. Drives Ray fucking crazy, but of course Ray takes credit for it anyway. We all know it’s Liam.”
And at her mention of the trust and what Liam’s doing with his, I realize what this means. Liam said no to Ray. He chose himself. Ray could and will challenge the inheritance.
An idea sparks, sending hope spreading warm and electric through my veins. I think I know what to do. It’s going to be a gamble, but I know I wasn’t wrong about Liam’s siblings: they will always choose the money.
I reach for my purse and mouth to my dad that I have to go but I’ll fill him in as soon as I can.
“Blaire,” I say, opening my Uber app, “I need to tell you something, and you’re not going to like it. But first… do you know where Liam lives?”
TURNS OUT, BLAIRE ONLYvaguely knows where Liam lives, and after I fill her in on the situation with the loophole and the trust and how she and Alex and all the Weston children could possibly lose all their money, she’s screaming too much to be very useful anyway.
Jake is more helpful. He replies to my text saying he has no idea what Liam’s address is, because every time he’s visited, Liam has picked him up at the airport.
Do you just float through life completely oblivious?
I mean yeah. Sort of
Wait—ok there’s a park near his place in Palo Alto
I think it’s called Hoover Park
And his house is on a cul de sac. Is that helpful?
Actually yes.
I will stop drawing this portrait of you with bad skin and a bald spot
I’m assuming some shit went down
Because when Dad got off the phone with him, he flipped
Yeah. You’re on a plane?
If so, I’m sure it’s being broadcast on whatever news you can get in your first-class airplane apartment
Do you know if he turned down the CEO job?
I think he did.
Fuck.
No, you know what? Good.
Fuck Dad.
I don’t know if this means Jake knows about the condition in the trust, but I don’t have time to worry about it, because my driver is pulling up in front of Terminal 2 at LAX.
I am insane, I know this, but I convince myself the information I have is enough to go on and buy a ticket at the Delta counter for a flight to San Jose leaving in two hours.
While waiting at my gate, I discover that nearly every residential street in Palo Alto is a cul de sac. But once I land, and once I get out of the taxi at Hoover Park, I realize with devastation how easy it will be to find Liam’s house.
I only have to follow the news vans.