Chapter 5
Grant
The conference call ends with the usual pleasantries—a brief wave, congratulations on another successful close, promises to celebrate over scotch at some vague future date that probably won't happen.
I end the video feed and lean back in my chair, looking out at the city spread below my office windows. Thirty floors up, the traffic is silent, the noise of street level reduced to almost nothing.
A billion-dollar property acquisition in midtown, closed in under three months. I should be opening a good bottle of champagne to celebrate another win for Cross Holdings.
But I feel nothing.
My phone buzzes with congratulatory texts. My CFO. My lead attorney. A few board members who like to stay in the loop. I swipe through them without really reading, offering thumbs-up reactions that require no actual effort.
This should feel like a victory. It used to.
Now it just feels like another Tuesday.
I stand and walk to the windows, pressing a hand against the glass.
It's cold beneath my palm, the spring afternoon still carrying winter's chill this high up.
Below, people move through their lives—rushing to meetings, grabbing coffee, talking on cell phones, laughing with friends.
From up here, they're just shapes. Anonymous. Interchangeable.
Just like every deal I close. Every property I acquire. Every negotiation I win.
Transaction after transaction, and none of it means a goddamn thing.
I turn away from the window and check my watch.
Three-thirty. I have a development meeting at four, dinner with a city councilman at six-thirty—the kind of dinner where we'll talk about everything except what we're actually negotiating—and then home to my empty penthouse where I'll probably work until midnight.
The same routine I've followed for months. Years, if I'm honest.
Ever since Victoria.
I force myself to acknowledge the bitterness that still sits in my chest like a stone. My ex-wife. The woman I spent fifteen years married to, who I built an empire alongside, who gave me my daughter.
The woman who looked at me during our divorce proceedings and said, with perfect calm, that I'd never actually loved her. That I'd loved what she represented—the perfect wife, the perfect family, the perfect life that complemented my perfect success.
She wasn't entirely wrong.
But she also wasn't entirely right, and that's what makes it worse.
Because I did love her, in my way. Or I thought I did.
But somewhere along the line, our marriage became just another transaction.
I provided wealth and status; she provided elegance and social connections.
We negotiated our lives like a business partnership, and when the partnership dissolved, we divided the assets with the same cold efficiency we'd brought to everything else.
Everything except Samantha.
My daughter is the one thing we couldn't negotiate cleanly.
My phone buzzes again, and I glance at the screen, expecting another congratulations.
It's not.
Samantha: Mom says you're trying to reduce her alimony again. Real classy, Dad.
I close my eyes and count to five. Then ten.
Victoria is well-provided for. Absurdly so. The settlement was generous to the point of financial idiocy, and she knows it. But she also knows that taking these complaints to Samantha will get under my skin in a way that directly confronting me never could.
I should ignore it.
But I can't seem to stop myself from typing a response.
Me: That's between your mother and our attorneys. But for the record, I haven't touched her settlement, and I won't.
The three dots appear immediately. Disappear. Appear again.
Samantha: Whatever. I'm staying with mom this weekend.
Like she stays there every weekend. Like she's stayed there every weekend since the divorce, because being with Victoria means expensive shopping trips and unlimited credit cards and no expectations beyond looking pretty.
Being with me means dinner at seven sharp and questions about her college applications and reminders that money doesn't buy character.
I'm the parent who says no. Victoria is the parent who says yes.
It's not a competition I can win.
Me: Okay. I love you.
She doesn't respond. She never does when I say something that doesn't give her ammunition.
I set the phone down and return to the window, that familiar hollowness returning. My daughter is eighteen years old, brilliant and so full of rage that sometimes I don't know how to talk to her. Every conversation is a minefield. Every attempt at connection gets thrown back in my face.
And the worst part is that I understand. I do. Because I'm the one who shattered her perfect family. I'm the one who filed for divorce, who ended the carefully constructed illusion that we were happy.
I thought honesty would be better. Thought that living an authentic life, even a difficult one, was better than perpetuating a lie.
But Samantha doesn't see it that way. She sees a father who destroyed her world because he was bored with his marriage. A man who has everything but can't seem to be satisfied with what he has.
Maybe she's not wrong.
I'm reaching for my coffee when my mind does what it's been doing for weeks.
It conjures Emma.
Not intentionally. Not because I'm trying to think about her.
But because my brain seems determined to ambush me with memories at the most inconvenient moments.
Her laugh. The way she pushed her hair back when she talked about her plans for her fragrance company.
The fierce independence in her eyes when she talked about building it without her father's help.
The way she felt in my arms in that hotel room in Florence.
I set the coffee down before I can throw it against the wall.
I shouldn't have touched her.
The thought is familiar now, a mantra I've repeated so many times it's lost meaning. But it's true. I shouldn't have had dinner with her. Shouldn't have invited her to my suite. Shouldn't have kissed her, touched her, made love to her like I had any right to her body or her trust.
She's David's daughter.
My best friend's daughter.
A woman young enough to be—
I don't finish that thought. Can't finish it without hating myself.
But the alternative is worse. Because if I'm honest—truly, brutally honest—I have to admit that the night in Florence was the first time in years I've felt anything real.
The first time a conversation had true meaning.
The first time I touched someone and felt something other than the mechanical satisfaction of physical need being met.
Emma was real. Warm and brilliant and so goddamn alive that being near her made me remember what it felt like to want something beyond the next acquisition.
And I ruined it.
Because of course I did. Because that's what I do. I see something beautiful and authentic, something that exists outside the transactional logic of my world, and I can't help but reach for it. Pull it into my orbit. Try to make it mine.
Then I wake up alone, reading a note that calls what we shared a "beautiful mistake," and I'm reminded that some things aren't meant to be owned.
Some people don't want to be saved.
I grab my phone and pull up our text thread from last night.
I've tried to give her space. Tried to respect the boundary she drew when she walked out of my hotel room. But I had to reach out. I needed her to know how I’m feeling.
Her response was brief. Polite. The kind of message you send to be courteous, not to encourage further conversation.
And now I'm standing in my office, after closing a billion-dollar deal, but the only thing I actually want is to know what Emma Sullivan is thinking. And if she's thinking about me.
My assistant's voice crackles through the intercom. "Mr. Cross, your four o'clock is here."
I glance at my watch. They’re fifteen minutes early.
"Give me five minutes," I say.
I straighten my tie and return to my desk, pulling up the development proposal we're about to discuss. Mixed-use property in Brooklyn, residential over retail, exactly the kind of project that transforms neighborhoods and generates excellent returns.
I skim through the financials, trying not to think about Florence.
I can still feel Emma in my arms. Still hear the way she gasped my name when I was inside her. Still smell the perfume on her skin, taste the wine on her lips, and hear her laugh when I said something that amused her.
I close my eyes and will the images to go away.
This is pathetic. I'm a forty-two-year-old man, obsessing over a twenty-four-year-old woman who made it perfectly clear she doesn't want to pursue whatever happened between us.
I should move on. Should accept that Florence was a blip, a moment out of time that can't survive in the real world. I should be grateful she had the sense to end it before it became even more complicated.
But I can't.
Because she's not just some woman I met and slept with. She's Emma. Smart and fierce and passionate. She has dreams that don't involve me or my money or anything I can provide. She wants to succeed on her own terms, and she's willing to work herself into the ground to make it happen.
She reminds me of myself, twenty years ago. Before the wealth and the status and the careful construction of a life that looks perfect from the outside but feels empty on the inside.
She's what I could have been if I'd cared more about staying true to myself and less about accumulating proof of my worth.
The intercom crackles again. "Mr. Cross?"
"Send them in."
I stand, buttoning my jacket, and arrange my face into the expression I've perfected over two decades of high-stakes negotiations. Calm, cool and collected.