Chapter 33
CASH
Iwas jetlagged and in a shitty mood when I pulled through the gates of my father’s estate.
I hated that I had to come to him. I was tired and just wanted to go back to my apartment and sleep.
I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to smell Cleo’s perfume or hear her singing off key.
I didn’t want to look at that purple streak of hair and those soul-searching eyes.
Liar.
I wanted to go home and close my eyes so I could see all of that stuff in my head.
The butler let me in and silently pointed to the study.
I could smell cookies and knew Kathy was baking.
She was always baking. She was probably going to be babysitting a gaggle of grandkids and wanted to be prepared.
I hoped to get this over with and leave before they showed up. I was not in a kid-friendly mood.
I walked into my father’s office. He was behind the desk, laptop open and readers on.
“I’ve been waiting,” he said.
“I had to fly across the Atlantic. Took me a minute.”
He looked up at me then, clearly not expecting my sarcasm. I was always professional with my father. I didn’t talk back.
I sat down without his invitation.
“What happened?” he asked as he closed his laptop.
“I let Rossi out of the contract. Clean break. No penalties.”
“You did what?”
I shrugged. “It’s done. It’s over.”
“No penalties.” He said it slowly, like maybe he’d misheard. Like maybe his firstborn son, the one who’d spent the last thirty years being his perfect soldier, hadn’t just walked away from a multi-million-dollar deal. “Cash, do you have any idea what you did?”
“I have a very clear idea.” I sat back in the chair across from him, making myself comfortable.
“Rossi is hemorrhaging money. Has been for years. His wife has a spending problem, he’s made bad investments, and he’s months behind on payments to creditors.
If we’d pushed the deal through, we would have been tied to his mess when it all collapsed.
Legal did a deep dive. I didn’t just make a decision because I felt like it. ”
“That’s not your call to make.”
“Actually, it is.” I met his eyes. “You sent me to Rome. You told me to secure the deal or let it go. I let it go.”
“I told you to secure it.”
“You told me to handle it. I did.”
His jaw clenched. I watched him try to find the angle, the argument that would put me back in my place. He’d been doing it my whole life. Redirecting, reframing, reminding me that I was a Bancroft and that meant something.
It had always worked before.
“The optics of this are not good,” he started.
“They’re fine.” I cut him off. “Rossi can’t afford to make noise about why we dissolved the partnership. He’s too busy trying to keep his own empire from crumbling. And we’re clean. No scandal. No headlines about Bancroft Holdings propping up a sinking ship.”
“You should have consulted me.”
“You were unavailable.”
“I’m never unavailable for business.”
“I made an executive decision.”
Silence. He stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time. Maybe he was.
“What’s gotten into you?” he asked finally.
“Nothing’s gotten into me.”
“You made an executive decision without consulting me?” He stood, hands flat on the desk. “That’s not how we operate.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.”
“Excuse me?”
I stood too. “Maybe the problem is that I’ve spent too long taking orders instead of making decisions. Maybe the problem is that you’ve turned me into your errand boy instead of treating me like a partner.”
His eyes flashed. “You are not a partner. You’re my son.”
“I’m forty years old.”
“And you work for me.”
“Do I?” The question hung in the air between us. “Because I’m starting to think that’s not working for either of us anymore.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m taking a step back.” I hadn’t planned to say it but the words felt right. “I’m going to evaluate my place within the company. Figure out what I actually want. And then I’ll let you know if I’m staying, and what changes I need to make if I do.”
Dad’s face went through several colors. “You’re threatening to leave.”
“I’m threatening to live. There’s a difference.”
“Cash, what happened? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’ve watched my brothers meet women, fall in love, and start families and I’m the asshole sitting in an office running the business that keeps everyone fat and happy. They don’t need me to do that anymore. I’m taking a big step back and figuring out what I want.”
“Take the day and reconsider.”
“I’ll be in touch.” I’d never done that before. Never walked away from my father. Never told him no. It was freeing.
I walked toward my car, pulled out my phone, and called Finn. “Are you free?”
“Where are we going? Cancun? St. Tropez? Ibiza?”
“I need a drink in the United States.”
“You need something a hell of a lot stronger than a drink, brother.” I could hear the grin in his voice. “Meet me at McGinty’s in an hour.”
McGinty’s was a dive bar in Brooklyn that Finn had discovered during one of his many phases of slumming it with normal people.
Dark wood, sticky floors, the kind of place where nobody gave a shit if your last name was Bancroft or Smith.
The kind of place that didn’t appreciate guys in five-thousand-dollar suits.
I stopped by my apartment and changed into jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. Then I found Finn at the bar nursing what looked like whiskey, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of boots that made him look like a biker. Getting his fashion tips from our cousin Mason apparently.
I sat down at the table that had been carved with some very colorful language. The server was a woman with impressive tattoos. She put a whiskey in front of me without asking what I wanted.
I took a drink. Then another.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Just left Dad’s office.”
“How’d that go?”
“About as well as you’d expect.” I finished the whiskey and held up my glass to the bartender. “I told him I’m taking a step back from the company.”
Finn’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re fucking with me.”
“I’m not.”
Two more whiskeys were delivered.
“Cash Bancroft—perfect son, golden child, daddy’s favorite errand boy—told Armand Bancroft he’s taking a step back?”
“Don’t make me regret telling you.”
“I’m not making you regret anything. I’m celebrating.” He raised his glass. “It’s about goddamn time.”
We drank.
“He’s not going to let it go,” I said after a while.
“Probably not.”
“I’m leaving the company high and dry.”
“Cash.”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You’re spiraling. I can see it happening. You’re already second-guessing yourself, already coming up with reasons why you should go crawling back and apologize.” He leaned closer. “So I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly.”
“What question?”
“What do you want?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
“Come on,” Finn pressed. “Not what Dad wants. Not what’s good for the family. Not what you should want. What do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I have everything I could want,” I said finally. “The job, the money, the name.”
“Bullshit.” He said it without heat. “I’m going to ask you again in three hours. Let’s go. We’re leaving.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to a junkyard in Queens.
“What the hell is this?” I asked. “If you’re in need of a car, I’ll spot you fifty grand.”
“Therapy.” Finn got out of the cab. “Come on.”
The junkyard was acres of broken-down cars and rusted metal left to decay. A chain-link fence surrounded the whole thing. A sign read “Smash Palace” in spray paint.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“I’m really not.” Finn walked up to a small office where a guy with more piercings than teeth handed him two baseball bats. “Paid for an hour. Let’s have some fun.”
Finn tossed me a bat.
I caught it. “This is your solution? Breaking things?”
“Yep.”
“That’s impulsive and immature.”
“Maybe that’s your problem.” He walked into the yard, bat over his shoulder. “Maybe you need to be a little impulsive and immature for once in your life.”
“I didn’t even do this shit when I was a teenager.”
“Exactly.” He stopped in front of an old sedan with smashed windows and a caved-in roof.
“You’ve spent your whole life being responsible.
Being the good son. Taking care of everyone else’s problems.” He looked at me.
“When’s the last time you did something just because you wanted to? Just because it felt good?”
I thought about Cleo and the couple of days with her. “I do shit all the time.”
“Liar.” Finn swung.
The bat connected with the sedan’s windshield and glass exploded everywhere. The sound was incredible. Sharp and violent and deeply satisfying.
He turned to me, grinning. “Give it a try. It feels good.”
“This is stupid.”
“Probably.” He swung again, taking out a side mirror. “Do it anyway.”
I looked at the bat in my hands. It wasn’t illegal. I wouldn’t be breaking any rules and risking shame to the Bancroft name.
Fuck it. I swung.
The bat connected with a door panel and the impact vibrated up my arms. Something in my chest loosened. Like the weight that I carried shifted a couple of inches.
I swung again. And again. And again. All the frustration I’d been carrying, about my father, about the business, about walking away from Cleo when every fiber of my being wanted to stay, came pouring out in a series of violent, satisfying crashes.
I broke windows. Dented hoods. Shattered headlights.
I had no idea how much anger I’d been holding in.
When I finally stopped, I was breathing hard, sweating through my shirt, and my hands hurt from gripping the bat so hard.
Finn was watching me with a satisfied expression. “Feel better?” he asked.
“Actually, a little, yeah.”
“Good.” He walked over and stood beside me, both of us looking at the destruction we’d caused. “Now I’m going to ask you again. What do you want, Cash?”
This time, I didn’t hesitate. “I want my own life,” I said.
Finn threw his head back and laughed. “It’s about fucking time.”
I started laughing too.
“What do I do?” I asked when we’d both calmed down.
“About Dad?”
“About all of it.”
“You figure out what your own life looks like.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “And then you go get it.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
We spent another twenty minutes beating the shit out of cars. I’d never been a violent person. I didn’t get into fights. But holy hell, there was something to be said for losing my shit in a very violent way.
Finn had ordered a cab and I was actually thinking about paying for another hour.
“We’ll come back,” he said like he had read my mind. “You’re going to be feeling this tomorrow.”
He was probably right. I didn’t care. I felt good. I felt alive. I felt like taking a bat to my whole damn world.