Chapter 12 #2
“You want to break vows, and you talk to me about breaking things? No.” Their father’s voice reverberated through the house, infused with the conviction of a true believer.
“I see through this, Grace. You provoke me with insults, then say I’m a bully.
You lie, so you call me a liar. Every accusation out of your mouth is a confession.
” Zach felt the rapid drum of Bonnie’s heart.
“The truth is all I do is for you. Private school for your children, I pay for your vacations, your endless clothes and bags and—”
“None of this is for us. And all that’s nothing, compared to what—”
“The disrespect! After all I’ve done for you?”
“You don’t want respect. From me, the kids? You just want obedience.”
“Are you on something? On top of the drinking, I mean. Because—”
“It’s fraud, Bram!” their mother interrupted, an act so forbidden that Zach and Bonnie gasped.
“You are insane,” their father said, sounding so calm now, as if this revelation explained it all.
And their mother did sound strange. Shrill, out of pitch, her voice breaking in the middle whenever she spoke.
“You want to find fraud? Look at our neighborhood here, huh? You’ve got oil and gas execs, a diamond mine heiress, a server farm billionaire.
All the money in this world is blood money, and guess what?
No one gives a shit, not even you. Those are your friends.
Yet I build a business from the dirt up, and you act like I’m some kind of, of—fraud?
No. I’m the only one who works hard, who deserves any of it. ”
“I don’t want to hear about other people, Bram. I care what you’ve done. You think everyone’s below you, hate that you’re not the best, the richest, and—you haven’t thought of what it will mean for the kids, and they said you’ve taken risks your investors didn’t agree—”
“What ‘they’? Who’s ‘they’?” There was a new and unprecedented hitch in his words, an urgency, and Zach imagined the Underself crouching, spider legs pinning his mother, eyes examining every twitch in her expression.
Bonnie started to cry. Zach leaned close and whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay. She’ll stop. She’ll stop making him angry.”
“What ‘they,’ Grace?”
“No one.” Their mother’s voice had transformed to a thin, transparent husk.
“This is—you’ve been planning this. After all these years you’ve decided I’m not rich enough so you—what?
Stole some account information? And showed someone.
Of course you did. That’s what gold diggers do.
” The Underself’s darkness seemed to soak through the walls, coating the children in a membrane of cold, ominous threat.
“Probably showed them the prenup, too, which is why you’re lying, trying to blackmail me.
That’s what this is. Who’d you show, Grace? What did you bring them?”
“Stay there. Stay right there.” Their mother’s voice was a desperate plea to something wild, over which she knew she had no control.
“You’re so dramatic,” Bram said, but the familiar assessment, familiar insult, was fissured with an unfamiliar, hissing insidiousness. “I can’t believe you, playing innocent when you want to destroy my family, my business. Who are they? What did you show them?”
A long beat before Grace capitulated, voice trembling at the edge of something. “Just—the life insurance trusts. I wanted to understand how they worked. So I talked to a lawyer, who talked to an accountant.”
“What else? They wouldn’t say anything about Ajax Prop if all you handed over was the trust agreements.”
“Only—Alpine Bank. And a—taxes folder. From your office.”
“Which office, home or downtown?”
“Here. But”—their mother’s words tripped over each other in a rapid waterfall of reassurance—“I didn’t let them keep anything, and it’s all confidential, lawyers can’t say anything and the accountant, that was all anonymous, so they can’t say anything to anyone, so it doesn’t matter.”
“What exactly did they say?”
“No-nothing.”
“What did the lawyer say, Grace.”
“Just that—they thought—you might not have software at all. That even if you did, you haven’t used it to buy undervalued properties, because the business doesn’t own any real estate at all.
And that instead the investor money is in risky things.
Shorting stocks. Crypto. And it did well.
For a long time. But now, that’s changed. And it’s gone. Or almost gone.”
During the long quiet that followed, Bonnie squeezed Zach’s hand until it hurt.
He didn’t shake her off, consumed by trying to understand.
What was a trust? A short stock? Things his father had to think about.
Things that had made him pause. When Bram finally spoke, his straightforward, unemotional precision frightened Zach more than anything that had come before.
“Think it through, Grace. They couldn’t know what every subsidiary holds.
Not with only those files. Sure, there have been some losses.
But every sector in the world is in free fall right now.
Did you ask how the business was doing compared to everyone else?
Because I’m fine, Grace. And it’ll bounce back.
Only a matter of time. Look at who my investors are—those are the real businessmen, and they chose me. ”
“They said without investor knowledge, it’s criminal, tha—”
Bram cut her off, a man whose patience was being tested. “You’re buying into some lawyer’s incompetence. After all I’ve done. Taking some stranger’s word over mine, over the father of your children. The only person who truly knows you, and still loves you.”
In her hurt voice, the same one she used when she came back from the hospital after breaking her fingers in the slamming door, she said, “I don’t think you ever did. Love us. I don’t think you can.”
Another potent lull before Bram’s bitter judgment: “If I didn’t love you, you couldn’t hurt me this way.”
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. Too late, because what she’d spilled couldn’t be put back, the unforgivableness of it clear in their father’s voice. “I’m sorry, Bram.”
Silence. Stillness. Bonnie breathing beside him, waiting.
“I’m going,” Bram said, “just like you wanted. I can’t be anywhere near you right now. You’re disturbed. Heartless. You need help.”
Bram’s footsteps down the hall, his mother’s muted weeping, then the distant grind of the garage opening.
Grace cracked Zach’s bedroom door, Bonnie snoring beside him by then.
Through the knit of his lashes as he pretended to be asleep he saw his mother had a bottle of wine in one hand, a glass in the other.
“It’ll all be better. He’s gone now. It’ll all be okay.”
Zach stayed still, breathing evenly so that she’d leave, so that he wouldn’t have to talk about what he’d overheard.
The wind outside shrieked, and it was his mother calling for him across the open expanse of the avalanche path she’d watched him cross last year. It was his mother, shrieking, desperate, searching.
“Zakky?”
He shot up, disoriented, dry-mouthed, and unsure of where he was in space and time.