Chapter 43
T he problem with thinking about my adoptive father was that it already gave him a modicum of a victory over us.
If Edwin Hunt’s goal was to ruin us, then he could obviously do that by destroying our reputations, hurting those we loved, and otherwise wrecking havoc in our daily lives.
He wasn’t stupid enough to do something that could land someone in jail, and he certainly wasn’t stupid enough to have his hands directly tied to it.
Money had a way of separating someone from the chaos in that manner.
But he also could ruin us simply with the threat of it. I realized now that just by thinking about the possibilities of what he could pull, he had gotten in my head and established semi-permanent residency. And, unfortunately, I was justified in this.
I could never negotiate my way out of this.
A man like Edwin Hunt didn’t negotiate when he wanted to see his enemy beaten down.
No, the only way Edwin would ever negotiate was when he realized he had lost or was in a position to lose.
And for that to happen, we needed a hell of a lot more money than we had at the moment or we needed a miracle to occur.
Thinking about this didn’t make the fear of Edwin Hunt coming for me any smaller—it’s not like being aware meant I could rationalize the extent to which he could hurt us.
If anything, it made me more fearful of what was to come, and as I left Claire’s place following a breakfast I just couldn’t enjoy as much as I wanted to, I feared the worst at my place.
Maybe I was going a bit too far imagining that Edwin had ordered someone to ransack our place, but it wasn’t out of the question, especially since Melanie and Morgan were helping to cover my expenses.
Morgan’s slush fund could help cover us for a lifetime, but the more expenses we added onto that, the less likely we were to have the funds to grow our investments firm as we wanted to.
This wasn’t about just making enough money to live comfortably—this was about making enough to crush Edwin Hunt.
If that made me more like him… so be it. I only had deigns on crushing one psychotic old man, not on anyone who dared to offend me.
I left Claire’s place with a quick kiss on the lips and an exit that probably looked a lot smoother than I actually felt.
Everything with Sarah and everything with Edwin had turned my mind into a hurricane of paranoia, in which the eye of the storm felt like nothing more than an illusion—that I could see the oncoming trainwreck and it was only a matter of time before it all went to hell.
And by a matter of time, I mean I could all but literally see it all coming into utter chaos.
I kept glancing over my shoulder for spies or for anyone looking at me leaving this building, but I didn’t see anyone. It didn’t assuage me—Edwin could go beyond just men in the streets watching me. He could, and would, do anything.
At some point, it occurred to me that maybe I should have just give one giant non-fuck and shrugged my shoulders at it all.
Edwin would trail me… and? He would ruin a business deal?
I still had the relationships he would never have.
He might win in the short-term, but when he went to bed at night, wouldn’t it be enough to know that he would have a wife that didn’t truly love him and his only biological child estranged from him?
No.
It’s not.
Even if we wish it was, we don’t live in a fairytale land in which you can forgive and forget. This is the world of the rich, Chance. You want to play on the big stage? Then you better be ready for some major league shit to go down.
And you better be ready to swing right back when the time comes.
The thought did do one thing to me, though.
It made me realize my greatest weapon against Edwin was not showing concern or affection from anything done to me.
Edwin could break me, but his greatest moment, in his mind, was seeing Morgan and I beg for mercy and forgiveness.
I would not crumble. I would never crumble.
But Morgan… I worried about Morgan.
When I got to my apartment, the first thing I wondered was if anyone would have broken in. Stupid, perhaps, but not that stupid. Nope, the door opened completely normally and without any problems.
But that’s where the normalcy ended.
On my couch, Morgan laid passed out in what could only be described as a drunken slumber.
He looked like he had fallen asleep with his mouth open, drool falling out.
He snored loudly. His legs half-drooped off of the couch.
And a bottle of half-finished gin sat on the coffee table, along with Morgan’s phone and some half-eaten Chinese.
“Fucking a, Morgan,” I mumbled to myself, even though I had sympathy for his current situation. “What the hell happened last night?”
As if answering my question, Morgan’s phone lit up with a text from a girl named Rachel.
I couldn’t pin if she was one of the girls that had come to the hotel in my blackout, but I could tell from her words—“Get help, Morgan”—that if she was, she probably didn’t have much interest in pursuing a second round with me or the true Hunt in the family.
Though it felt like a slight invasion of privacy, given my concern for Morgan, I reached down and looked at his phone.
He had several notifications, most of them texts from girls and missed calls from phone numbers I didn’t recognize.
Well, I didn’t know specifically who they were from, but I had a feeling I knew where they came from.
And that’s when something began to dawn on me.
Edwin Hunt might have hated me most, but it was obvious who had cracked under the pressure the most in the previous couple of months.
It was Morgan. Morgan was the one Edwin saw slowly losing his mind every day, slowly cracking under the weight of expectations, slowly starting to become overburdened by the work laid upon him.
Edwin also knew that Morgan and I were attached at the hip as far as our business went. If one of us left, the other would have no choice. I would just tell him to fuck off, but Morgan actually had to live with the fact that that was his father.
My plans for striking back at Edwin, my plans for ignoring him, my plans for outlasting him suddenly seemed awfully dependent upon the actions of my brother.
Once again, I was back to looking up to Morgan as someone who couldn’t possibly realize the implications of his actions and words.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
“Oh, fuck.”
Well, he’s alive, if I had any doubts before.
I sat on the chair across from him as he slowly awoke. It was not lost on me how similar this incident was to a few weeks back, except now I was sitting across from Morgan… and Morgan didn’t have a pile of cash… and Morgan didn’t have a hot girl in bed next to him.
So, in short, I had the setting correct but the details so thoroughly missing that what I had thought was a mirror image was really just a mirage in my mind to make me feel like I might have swapped power dynamics when all I had done was create a false illusion.
“You’re back,” he said, his voice so scratchy I feared the mere vibrations of his vocal chords would tear at his throat.
“I had a relaxing evening,” I said, careful still not to reveal the true nature of my relationship with Claire. “Unfortunately, it does not look like the same could be said for you.”
“Fucking tell me about it,” Morgan said.
He sounded like he had more to say, but he just put his arm over his head, steadying his breathing, presumably trying to avoid throwing up.
For what felt like several long minutes, he simply lay in that position.
I was reduced to scrolling through my phone to kill the time as Morgan recovered.
I almost got up and started cooking breakfast when Morgan stood up without warning, headed for the bathroom, and proceeded to puke his guts out. Been there, done that, I thought with some sympathy as I put aside some bacon in case he wanted to come back to it.
Morgan slowly staggered his way back to the kitchen as I started to put the bacon on the pan. The sizzling soon emerged, but it did little to get over the sound of Morgan writhing in pain from the self-induced hangover.
“I drank way too much, Chance,” he said.
I just laughed as I would when we said the same thing in college.
“I’m serious.”
There was no laughter anymore. Not with the tone of voice he spoke with. Not with the lack of faux pleading we would make after a night out in New York as juniors or seniors at Columbia.
“I let what’s going on get to me, and it’s getting to me bad,” he said, rising out of the couch.
He sat there for several seconds, his hands gripping the edge of the mattress, his eyes downcast, his breathing slow.
Behind me, the bacon’s scent wafted into my nose, but for perhaps the only time in my life, I ignored it.
I could have let that bacon go all day for how much Morgan had my attention.
“I’m worried I’m losing my father,” Morgan said. “I know he’s being a tyrannical asshole right now. But I can’t pretend that losing him is something I can so easily dismiss.”
And with that, my worst fears were confirmed. I could toss Edwin Hunt to the side because I had never had a strong relationship with the man. Losing Edwin Hunt mattered as much to me as losing my favorite pen—it might have sucked to have misplaced, but I would find it soon enough.
But Morgan didn’t know him as Edwin or Mr. Hunt. He knew him as dad.
I never knew my biological father, so I couldn’t pretend that I understood what it meant to have such a strong bond that you would ignore harassment and things bordering on illegal.
But I knew from seeing other people and seeing how much Mrs. Hunt stressed over matters that it was a far more common thing that anything I had ever experienced.
But all the same, that could not change anything about the current path we were on. There was just no choice in the matter—we either won, we lost, or we quit and gave in to Edwin, but the latter two options produced the same outcome for me.
Does it for Morgan though?
Because that might determine what the outcome ends up being anyways.
“I’m sorry, Morgan,” I said. I was more sorry for his state than I was for why he was in that state, but I really did empathize with him. “I know shit sucks right now. But I’m going to have to break it to you even worse than that. Things are about to get a lot harder.”
Morgan didn’t even have the energy to groan or lean back. Instead, he just looked like a motionless statue, carved into the spot he was, like the hungover version of The Thinker statue.
“If we want to be independent and we want to succeed—which, by the way, we are with Rising Sun and Virtual Realty—then we knew this would happen.”
“Did we, though?”
I had started to turn around to the bacon to flip it over, but Morgan’s words caused me to stare off into the distance in thought. Had we?
I sure had.
Had Morgan?
“I thought this would blow over by now. You know my father. He gets uproariously angry but he’s not stupid.
He knows anger won’t make him money. Yeah, he’s worth billions, so what’s a few extra million here and there?
For a guy like him, as it turns out, a lot.
He treats it like a game where every day he has to be doing something to give himself a little extra cash. ”
“And yet…”
Morgan cleared his throat as the pan erupted from me finishing my flip of the bacon.
“And yet it seems different than before,” Morgan said. “I don’t want to lose my dad, Chance. I don’t. Nothing is worth losing family over.”
Nothing. Not even our business…
It’s different because I’ve never considered Edwin as family.
But Morgan…
“You might have to,” I said, a statement I immediately regretted for the level of honesty it produced.
I could be blunt to a fault—and it could work an awful lot, especially when it came to women and business—but to say it to my half-dead brother in his current state might as well have been telling him to go fuck himself in any other state.
“I don’t think I can.”
“OK, well, let’s think on this,” I said.
I didn’t have anything else to add at the moment, but I needed to quell the bleeding from what I had just said. Fucking stupid, Chance. Real fucking stupid. Why don’t you think this through for real and not just say it?
“Can we keep your father placated while we keep doing what we are doing?”
“He’s your father…”
Now it was Morgan’s turn to feel like a massive idiot for what he said, especially because he saw the fire in my eyes when he looked up.
I had more respect for the pigeons of New York City than I did Edwin Hunt.
I had the same level of respect for him as I did the rats—no, at least the rats just did what they were born to do. Edwin was worse.
“Can we keep your father placated and keep MCH?” I said, making sure to emphasize the personal adjective as well as bite my tongue before I made a truly scathing remark about Edwin.
“I have no idea,” Morgan said.
That was fine. I did not expect Morgan to have any ideas.
The problem was I didn’t really have any ideas either. I had to give Edwin this—he was as stubborn as I was. We both knew what we wanted to accomplish, and the idea of either of us yielding was laughable.
Nevertheless, there was something to be said for our relationship freezing over into a sort of passive Cold War in which neither would bother to hurt the other for fear of reprisal and escalations.
We could never go back to being a full family, but at least the bullshit Edwin was throwing our way would end.
“It’s times like these I wish we had someone objective to talk to,” Morgan said.
“I need someone who knows what this is like. Who knows what it’s like to have family split apart by business.
But good luck finding that. Most billionaires either know how to save face or actually have a functioning family. Most…”
I had tuned out Morgan by that point, because I was attached to something he had said. I need someone who knows what this is like.
The funny thing was, I did. To go back and speak to them was a dangerous game, especially with everything that had happened and was still happening, but…
“Morgan,” I said, interrupting. I grabbed my phone, sent off a quick text, and then pulled the bacon off of the pan.
It was a little crispier than normal, but it was still edible.
I placed some in front of Morgan, who took a few nibbles.
He groaned with a weird mixture of pleasure and pain, but at least he let out a pleasurable sigh.
“Let me take care of it. I have an idea.”
“You know someone?”
I smirked.
“You could say that.”