23. Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
~DARCY~
My new life goals are simple after the Meridien gala is over—
So far, I’m failing at both.
It's five AM on Saturday, seven hours since the gala ended, four hours since I walked back into the hotel alone, three hours since I relocated myself and my single overnight bag into Jessica and Quinn's suite.
I'm sitting on the balcony of their fourteenth-floor room in my gala dress watching Miami go from purple to pink.
The city is quiet at this hour, almost gentle.
The bay is flat and dark, just beginning to catch the first gray light.
A pelican crosses the water below, slow and prehistoric, and somewhere in the distance a boat horn blows as the smell of salt and tropical flowers and the sickly sweet diesel exhaust of a city that never quite fully sleeps permeates the air.
I have my color-coded notebook open on my knee.
Green pen in hand.
Green is for planning.
Green is for moving forward.
Green is for “I will not cry on this balcony in a formal gown I'm never going to wear again.”
I filed my PTO with Wyeth's assistant at four AM via email.
Subject line: Personal circumstances requiring immediate leave. Will be in touch re: transition.
I spent forty-five minutes writing and deleting and rewriting that subject line.
Then I packed my bag. I’d sat outside Jessica's door for ten minutes before knocking, because it was two AM and she had every right to slam the door in my face and go back to sleep.
But she didn't.
She took one look at me—sand in my hair, mascara somewhere south of where it started, gala dress, no shoes—and pulled me inside without a word.
We sat on her balcony until four AM where I told her everything.
The real name. The father. The job. The marriage. The pregnancy.
All of it.
In order.
Like pulling a very long, very painful splinter out of a wound that's been infected for months.
She didn't disown me.
She handed me a bottle of sparkling water, waited until I finished, and said, "Quinn is going to be insufferable about this."
Then she hugged me for a long time.
I cried.
She didn't. Because Jessica Shaw doesn't cry, she problem-solves — but she held on until I stopped.
She's asleep now, inside.
And I'm here, on the balcony, with my notebook.
Building the plan.
Except—
The plan that's supposed to be coming out of my green pen isn't the one I expected.
I thought I'd be writing a resignation letter.
A timeline for finding a new job.
A list of affordable OBGYNs in the Astoria area.
A script for the conversation with my mother that I've been avoiding for three years.
Instead what's coming out of my hand is this:
Cole Capital Management — assets:
Primary holdings: Commercial real estate portfolio, Southeast US. Miami, Atlanta, Tampa.
Secondary holdings: Distressed debt vehicles. At least three active acquisition targets currently in negotiation.
Known associates: Ricardo Dominguez, Alexander Webb.
Current activity: Competing bid on Tulum property — FAILED.
Ongoing: [what else?]
I stare at what I've written.
My father's business.
His assets.
His methods.
Written in my neat green handwriting in my color-coded notebook at five AM on a Miami hotel balcony.
I don't know why my hand wrote this.
I don't know what my brain is trying to tell me.
I click the pen, staring at the list before clicking the pen again.
My father spent five years befriending Thomas Shaw and then twenty-four years trying to finish what he started.
He sent men to grab me off a Fifth Avenue sidewalk.
He made a competing bid on the Tulum deal that accelerated everything.
And, in no way, do I think he’s done.
Whatever he's planning next—whatever the "ongoing" at the bottom of that list turns out to be—he is absolutely, categorically not done.
And I am the only person in the world who knows both sides of this.
Who knows my father's methods and his patterns and the particular way he operates.
Who also knows—intimately, professionally, and personally—exactly what the Shaw Group is building and where it's vulnerable.
I click the pen a third time and write one more line at the bottom of the list.
Figure out what he's doing next.
I stare at that line for a long time.
The sky goes from gray to pale pink to the first thin wash of gold along the horizon as Miami slowly wakes up around me.
It’s the city of my birth. A city I’ve often thought of as belonging to my father.
The city where everything fell apart.
And now it might possibly be the city where I figure out how to put it back together.
I close the notebook, pressing my hand flat against the cover, and sit there as the sun comes up, trying to figure out if what I just wrote in green ink is the beginning of a plan.
Or the beginning of something I can't take back.