Chapter 31
I’m not going to lie: this situation has really turned itself around.
We’re almost at the good part now, with hardly any arm-twisting at all.
It could be quick from here. The pace is up to them, though: if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my father, it’s that it’s no good slowing things down at the eleventh hour.
It all worked out in the end, in case you are wondering.
Yes, my father’s personal fortune was seized, his reputation ruined, his empire disbanded.
Yes, he lost the penthouse and the Hamptons house and the Paris apartment and—this one hurt the most—the Chasing Sunshine, but my father must have seen the gray skies gathering on the horizon, because he had his affairs in order.
In our family safety deposit box, tucked among my mother’s jewelry (she hadn’t needed it, he’d said once, where she was going), there was a note to me in my father’s handwriting.
It contained a short, uncharacteristic kindness, and also some bank details that have gone a long way toward erasing his failures as a businessman.
Twenty-five million will buy you a lot of forgiveness, and so even though I’ve had to endure decades of dental work, and I had to change my name and uproot (get it?) my entire life, I do regret my last words to him as I watched him struggle to stay afloat, drowning in the disbelief that his own offspring had pushed him overboard: “Who’s the pussy now? ”