Chapter 3 #2
I didn’t want to, but I knew he would do something to rattle my cage if I persisted in my stubborn silence.
After a brief moment of contemplation, I said, “Fine. You’re going to find out regardless of whether or not I tell you, so let me save you the trouble.
” I pushed away from the desk and leaned back in my chair.
“I now own all the Weston Company’s debts, which are substantial after decades of mismanagement.
I also now own all of Duke Weston’s personal debts, including all the mortgages on that stupid mansion where you grew up all safe and soft and sound. ”
I watched him process it. He still smiled, but it looked like a sad, sideways thing.
I continued, “Not only that, but I also own virtually all the land the Malcom estate used to own in Alenbach. But most importantly, all the land where the Weston Company buildings reside.”
He nodded. “I gathered as much. So, what are you going to do with your family’s company?”
I met his gaze, unblinking, annoyed that he’d referred to the Weston Company as my “family’s company.” I’d been cut out of the Weston family at the age of four.
This annoyance fueled the steadiness of my answer. “I’m going to lay everyone off between Christmas and New Year’s, and then I’ll sell the parts of the company that have any value, piece by piece.”
To his credit, he didn’t look surprised. “You'll take a huge loss.”
“I will take a small loss on Duke’s mansion, true, because I plan on leveling it to the ground as soon as possible and turning the acreage into a landfill. But as for the rest”—I gave my head a considering tilt—“I don’t think so.”
“What about all the people, Alison? What about the employees? The Weston Company is the largest employer in Alenbach. What about those families?”
“Oh, you mean the same families who didn’t lift a finger to help my mother when Duke left us for your mom, and you, and your brother? Who spread rumors about my mom and shunned her? Those people?”
His exhale was sudden, the first and only sign of frustration from him so far. “Alison, you’re talking about a few gossips. Are you going to ruin hundreds, maybe thousands of lives just because of a few nasty gossips?”
“It’s considerably more complicated than that, but fine.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, I am.
What about them? Doing nothing is still a choice.
They might not have spread the rumors, but they stood by and did nothing to stop them or help us.
And now they get to pay the price for their apathy. ”
What I didn’t say was that, mostly, the employees were simply collateral damage to me.
Sure, I wanted them all to know how Duke had leveraged their future—including their pension and retirement—in order to bankroll his frivolous lifestyle.
But I couldn’t make this deal, acquire Duke’s debts, and turn any profit if I didn’t let everyone go.
Duke didn’t care about his employees, just like he didn’t care about me and my sister growing up, and he didn’t care when my mom died, and he didn’t care about Viv a few years ago when she was diagnosed.
So why should I care? Why should I take a loss on this deal when any other private equity firm wouldn’t even bat an eye shutting it all down, laying everyone off, raiding the pension fund, and selling the rest?
As my former business partner Marley used to say, Sometimes what’s good for business means regular people suffer.
Alaric opened his mouth, then shut it, giving me the sense my response had actually surprised him this time. Deeply. Like these words had knocked the wind from his lungs.
Sitting up straighter in the chair, I let my posture telegraph my rigidity on this subject. “Anyway. I have work to do. So, once again, good afternoon.”
I expected him to argue with me, to try harder, to talk me out of my plan.
Instead, he shook his head and simply walked out, the faint squeak of his Italian leather shoes on the polished concrete announcing his departure.
Straining my ears, I heard him leave through the glass door at reception without saying a word to Renee.
After it closed, the space went dead silent.
My head spinning, I stared at my screen, the pixels swimming together, and realized my hands were sweating. Not with guilt—never that—but with the old, familiar sense of the ground shifting under me. Of powerlessness and fear. Desperation.
But I wasn’t powerless this time.
Alaric could stop me, if he wanted. He had that power. If he moved quickly enough, he could file an injunction. He could keep me in court indefinitely. Hell, he could pay off all of Duke’s debts. Doing so wouldn’t make the slightest dent in Alaric’s personal wealth.
Except . . . I own the land now. I tried to soothe my frazzled nerves with the reminder that, no matter what, I owned the land that the Weston Company sat on.
And if Alaric did try to stop me, I would raise the rent to astronomical levels on all the properties.
Maybe I’d never get my revenge, not the way I wanted. But buckets of money would make an excellent consolation prize.
* * *
There’s a kind of silence in Texas that’s different from any other I’ve encountered during my—admittedly—sparse travels.
It’s the silence of enormity, a hush that lives in the spaces between words, born of sky so vast it drains the color from the horizon.
You feel it more acutely when you grew up in a place like Alenbach and have since spent a decade in cities where sound piles upon sound, insulating you from every awkward pause or cold shoulder or nonresponse.
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the silence.
I’d never been a fun traveler, or a fun person in general.
Returning to my home state seemed to enhance my un-funness to a whole new level.
By the time Renee and I had deplaned from our budget seats on our budget airline and shuffled through the jet bridge, I’d already catalogued a dozen ways I’d rather die than ever return to Texas.
Trampled by a mob at an O’Hare concourse Chili’s.
Crushed beneath the treads of a luggage robot at Midway.
Boiled to death in a vat of oil at Boston’s Logan airport’s Dunkin Donuts for correcting the barista’s pronunciation of “macchiato.”
But here I was, back in the land of my formative years, sweating through my clothes in late December. I wanted to blame the polyester lining of the suit jacket I’d thought would read “intimidating” but now clung to my back like the embrace of a desperate ex.
To be fair, it was unseasonably hot.
“There’s a cold front moving in,” Renee volunteered, as if guessing the direction of my thoughts. “It’s supposed to be in the twenties by Christmas.”
Christmas . . .
I tried not to scowl, but then I gave up and gave into the impulse.
Like most airports during this time of year, this one was bursting with holiday propaganda. Renee hummed off-key along with a version of “Jingle Bell Rock” polluting the air through the central speaker system. But her rendition could just as easily have been “Welcome to the Jungle.”
As we lumbered toward the rental car area, my assistant’s rolling backpack seemed to have declared war with her balance and, by extension, my own.
She walked in a diagonal, constantly veering toward either me or passing travelers, but always corrected at the last instant, grazing past with a cheerful “Oops, sorry! My bad!”
For my part, I’d woken up in an epically bad mood.
We had a rental car waiting, bad news to deliver, and a family legacy to salt and burn.
And yet, as we inched along the moving walkway, I felt less like a conquering general and more like a condemned prisoner, marching to my own execution with my last meal behind me.
And the last meal had been airplane food.
“Hey, boss.” Renee’s voice, bright and oblivious, managed to cut through the drone of boarding calls.
“If the rental desk tries to give you a Chevy Spark, can I have your permission to get into a screaming match with the clerk? I just feel like, as Texas natives, we have the right to something with more torque.”
“I told you to book economy. I’m not here to re-enact a King Ranch ad. I just want something with functioning AC and a trunk big enough for our bags.”
“Chevy Spark it is,” she said, her grin flattening.
A pop-up notification flickered across my phone as we reached the escalator, four more emails from legal, two flagged urgent.
I’d been fielding calls all day yesterday and half the night.
I took the opportunity to glance at the first subject line.
RE: Malcom Estate—Expedited Possession Timetable.
The message preview read: Need you to sign off ASAP on attached .
. . I put the phone away without reading further.
I’d received loads of updates about the Malcom deeds, but nothing yet about the debt filings which would allow me to move forward with the possession of the Weston Company itself, and that was strange. We should’ve heard something by now . . .
“You okay, boss?”
Glancing at Renee, I realized I was holding my middle. I’d had a stomach ache since Saturday and now my abdominal muscles were sore.
“I’m fine.” I dropped my arm from my torso and tried to take a deep breath. I couldn’t. Because what gnawed at me from behind my breastbone was Alaric’s radio silence.
After he’d left my office on Saturday, I’d half expected a certified envelope full of injunctions, petitions, and cease and desists.
Something, anything that would halt my momentum.
I thought maybe he’d even track me down at my basement studio apartment.
Instead, nothing. Not a mysterious voicemail, not even a passive-aggressive text message.
Wait. Does he have my cell phone number?
I’d never given it to him, but I felt certain that Alaric could obtain any phone number he desired. Maybe he didn’t desire mine. And that was fine.
And yet, now, as the escalator carried me and Renee down past illuminated advertisements for microbreweries and “Tex-clectic” fusion restaurants, I couldn’t stop replaying the last five minutes of our encounter in my office. The way he’d looked at me when I finally admitted what I intended to do.
I wished I knew his plans.
If he’d gone straight to my biological father, I would have heard about it by now. The silence from Duke’s camp meant they still had no idea what was about to occur, or that Alaric had figured out a way to stop me without tipping off his stepdad as to my intentions.
I should have been amping myself up for a fight, preparing a counter strategy. Instead, I felt only a strange, hollow pang of restlessness.
I was still puzzling over this when Renee jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow. Hard enough to make me drop the handle of my carry-on.
“Hey,” she said, “look at that.”
We were riding the final escalator down to the rental car counters, the floor below wide and shiny, big as a warehouse. Standing dead center, under a sign for “Ground Transportation,” was a man in a black suit holding a small white placard.
The placard read, in all caps, “ALISON WESTON.”