Epilogue Elio
One Year Later
I had a knot of worry the size of a watermelon in my stomach. Of course, he was going to hate this.
Then her hand touched my hand, and I felt calmer.
She stood there beside me on the deck, her sundress flowing in the wind.
She had tied her hair in a ponytail. Sea breezes, it turned out, were averse to ponytails.
More volume, fewer chances of blowing in the air like a pirate flag with no Jolly Roger.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” I said, holding her hand in mine. We stood on the deck, looking at the dawn sun coming up from behind the Manhattan skyline. “What if he hates it!?”
“You mean the guy who’s spent his entire life aura farming, a guy who doesn’t sit in anything less than a Rolls Royce, lives in a grand old mansion, calls himself the Don of New York even though he’s in his sixties?
It’s theatrics, babe. And your father’s a fan of them.
It’s time you start to understand his psyche,” she said, kissing my hand.
“And I’m pretty sure no one’s ever gifted him a mega-yacht before. ”
“That’s true,” I said. “But then again, no one’s ever bested him at his own game. So there’s that. Do you think he’s still sore over it? I mean, he acts all normal on calls and texts.”
“He’s going to be fine,” Maria said, giving me a kiss on the cheek and then going back to her lounger where she’d left a paperback half-unread.
A waitress emerged from below decks with a breakfast tray.
Smoothies, eggs Benedict, good old coffee, and whatever else my girlfriend desired. Oh, there was an acai berry bowl.
When I reached for it, I realized just how queasy I was, and it had nothing to do with being on the sea.
These days, Maria and I found ourselves on the sea more than on land.
Half of it had to do with business, and the other part, naturally, pleasure.
We’d sailed our yachts to all the major yachting festivals in America, and one in Europe.
Business was booming. Because of the enormous profits I’d brought Reinhold, they had given me shares and equity in their company.
I owned four percent of their shares, and that included Reinhold Aviation, Reinhold Mechatronics, Reinhold Rigging, and Reinhold Manufacturing. They were trying to get me to sell their private luxury airplanes, and I’d told them that I’d reconsider, but I wasn’t ready to scale just yet.
I was having too much of a good time to stop right now.
My friends, The Rejects, had established offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York, and they took care of the business end of things. That left the job of traveling to different yachting festivals to me and my beloved.
She was the one who had insisted that we travel to New York and extend my father an olive branch worth seven million dollars, one of the best yachts for its size that money could buy, a Reinhold classic.
They gave me a friends and family discount, cutting forty-percent of the price, but my father didn’t need to know that.
I’d kept tabs on him, naturally. Even though the man had tried to control my life and sabotage things, he was still my father, and after a year of reflection, I could better appreciate that he was only doing all of it for my good.
But I was thirty years old now, and I wanted to get married to Maria. I needed to bury the hatchet with him and ask for his blessing. After this, it was Maria’s parents that we were going to patch things up with.
As far as Maria’s own career was concerned, she had been promoted to remote editor.
She kind of made a very robust point with her editor that she didn’t really need a job anymore and that if he wanted to keep her around, he better sweeten the deal.
So he sweetened the deal. Made her editor, gave her the perk of working from home or wherever she happened to be, and bumped her salary by twenty-five percent.
It was good that she had work to keep her busy, because sometimes it got really boring with just us two on a yacht for days.
As the yacht pulled up to the New York harbor, my finger went into my pocket, where I’d kept the ring my mother had given me before her death, the ring that she’d said I should propose to the love of my life with.
I saw him standing there by the pier, hands in his pockets, not a single emotion on his face.
I pointed to the name of the ship. He gave it a look. I figured he might grin at the fact that I’d named it S.S. Olive Branch, but he simply nodded once.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” I said, my gut telling me to steer the ship in the opposite direction and make for safer isles.
“I’m with you,” she said, holding my hand. “We talked about this. This wasn’t going to be easy.”
“But did it have to be so soon?”
“We are planning on getting married. He needs to know this, regardless of how he reacts to it.”
We got off the boat and walked down the pier to where he stood. It must’ve been some year. His hair was thinning, and the frown lines on his face were deeper.
“Father,” I said, holding my hand out. It lingered in the air for a full five seconds before he begrudgingly shook it.
“Elio,” he said gruffly. His eyes went from me to Maria, and then to the boat behind us. “Whose idea was that?”
“Mine, actually,” Maria said, holding her hand out. This time, he didn’t take as much time in shaking it. “I figured—”
“You assumed,” My father said, his voice stern. “That a grand gesture like this was needed. Of course, since you and your partner have gone onto make great strides in the world,” he continued, his voice steeped in darkness. I couldn’t tell if it was envy, anger, jealousy, or something else.
“Father,” I said, trying to deescalate the situation, but Maria held her hand up and I quieted down.
“It’s okay, Elio,” Maria said, her gaze locked with my father. “He’s right. You have done in two years what he’s had a lifetime to do.”
My father leaned closer to Maria and said, “You think that I want to go legal?”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself,” Maria said, raising her eyebrows at him. “But that’s not why we’ve come here.”
“You let your woman talk for you or do you have a mouth of your own?” he asked, now staring at me with all his intensity. At one point in my life, that gaze meant the gaze of death to me. Now it didn’t affect me. Now I could see that there wasn’t as much power behind it as I’d earlier imagined.
“I’m marrying Maria,” I said, taking the keys of the ship out. “I would like to do it sooner than later. I wanted to inform you. And possibly invite you, if you’re interested.”
I raised the keys at him.
He looked at the keys, then at me. Finally he looked at Maria. Maria nodded at him.
My father sighed, and took the keys from my hand, giving me a nod.
There was the subtlest trace of a smile at the edge of his lips.