Chapter 6 Theo
My phone pings with a notification and my jaw immediately flexes at the name. The very last thing I want to do on my lunch break is sit in my office and have anything to do with my family. Against my better logic, I swipe open the message.
The article shouldn’t surprise me, and yet it creates the same heated coil in my gut as any other article my mother forwards.
At this point, I don’t know why I even bother.
The stethoscope slung around my neck feels like a noose.
I toss it onto my desk and close the office door, drowning out the staff and patient sounds from the clinic floor.
I sit back on the squeaky black leather chair and read the message. “You should at least make a feeble attempt to see him.” No greetings, no concerns for my well-being, no nothing but that one singular line, which mirrors everything about my upbringing—direct, cold, laced with guilt.
Oh, Mother. I’m sure she knows about my father.
The Astor family lineage—brilliant, connected, wealthy.
And masters of delusion and denial. My mother may be the daughter of a shipping tycoon and the one with the money, but she’ll never leave him.
Appearances will always matter more than truth.
Sweeping dirty secrets under the rug is an Astor family pastime.
And yet, as a glutton for punishment, I tap open the article.
“Dr. George K. Astor, Dean of the prestigious St. Benedicts University in Boston, New York Times bestselling author, and credited for his groundbreaking studies on neurodiversity and corporate leadership, will be signing books and taking audience questions at Columbia University…”
The words blur. Everything blurs. Since seeing Lexie last week in the flesh, smelling that vanilla on her skin, reveling in the way her freckles faded over the years and how her thick red hair begged to be wound and fisted in my grip, I’m pushed into a different reality. I need to fucking focus.
I tap off the article. I already know what it will say. The public adores this version of my father. The charming, gifted scholar, who can seduce a room of students and professionals alike in a single hour.
They don’t want to know about the father who, when I was a child, was only present in my life when I was useful to him—when my behavior could be observed, corrected, or folded into his research.
They wouldn’t want to hear that he demanded obedience and that the alternative was something far worse.
Children expect yelling, anger, noise when they’re in the wrong.
What they don’t expect is to be treated as though they no longer exist. When I was ten, he went an entire month without speaking to me after I said I didn’t want to attend a conference with him, as if refusing to perform had rendered me obsolete.
They’d be appalled to learn that the doctor celebrated as a beloved family man was the same person who perfected cruelty behind closed doors. I was never a child, but a subject.
I thought he only did the fucked-up mind games on me. But as I grew older, I realized I wasn’t the only one.
I’ve waited years to expose the truth. Building a case against my father, uncovering the rot beneath the world-renowned scholar and the lives he’s destroyed, has cost me time, money and more energy than I care to measure.
The need to burn his reputation to the ground, to show the world who he really is behind the cloak of degrees, bestselling books, and my mother’s powerful lineage, has consumed me. And finally, I’m close.
There’s too much riding on this for any kind of distraction. And yet, ever since I saw Lexie six months ago in that coffee shop window, my focus has been fractured.
Lexie cannot jeopardize my mission.
She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.
Where I had the kind of education money buys, hers came from the street and a sharp instinct for learning.
When I overheard her talking shit about me and Anna at her work, it was a reminder—I can’t let that happen again.
I’ve worked too hard to quietly expose my father’s atrocities, and I refuse to let Lexie—the woman who chose him over me—blow up everything I have planned.
The call I’ve been anticipating comes in. “This better be good news.”
I don’t hold back the fury in my voice and I can almost hear my assistant Michael’s heavy sigh through the receiver.
Having been on our family’s payroll since before I was born, I quickly learned Michael is a man who can do anything.
Things that need to be swept under rugs, he sweeps.
Evidence of wrongdoings, buried. Whispers and gossip, stamped out with blackmail and threats of retaliation.
Michael is the man that gets shit done, no matter what it is.
So, that’s why, right now, I don’t understand how hard it is to get me one goddamn studio apartment.
“It’s fifty/fifty,” Michael says. I immediately grit my molars. I’m a doctor. Fifty/fifty is unacceptable. Fifty/fifty means an equal chance of living or dying. That’s bullshit. And if those odds aren’t at one hundred by the end of the week, someone will pay.
“A west-facing one bedroom opened up—”
“East facing.” I exhale fire through my nose. “It has to be east facing.”
A long pause follows. “The west facing has better views, more space, is available immediately—”
“This is non-negotiable.” I push myself from the chair and pace my small office. What the hell does Michael not understand? He needs to make this happen and right the fuck now. My neck is hot. I hook my finger in my collar and tug.
It’s been three months of apartment hunting, and my patience is running thin.
The need to be close to Lexie again after so many years apart was eating me alive and, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t rest until I did something.
So, I settled on getting a place close to her.
But then the engagement happened—the perfect excuse to be in her presence one last time before I get married.
I told myself I’ll get my fix and finally get her out of my head for good.
With so much standing in my way, I realize how badly I need this one space to help quiet my spinning thoughts—especially after hiring Lexie as our wedding coordinator last week.
I have the means, I have Michael, and patience has never been my virtue. I get what I want, when I fucking want, and I despise being told no. But I’m desperate.
And I’m never fucking desperate.
“Listen to me. I don’t care what you have to do. Find dirt on the landlord. Grab the west facing one and bribe one of the renters in the east-facing apartments to switch. Threaten a tenant. Do you understand me? This gets taken care of this weekend.”
“You’re going to be married this summer,” Michael says. “I don’t understand why—”
“It’s done. This weekend. Understood?” My grip is so tight on the phone that I might crush it. I hang up before he has the chance to push out an exasperated sigh and give me his version of a fatherly scolding. Michael has never let me down. He will get this done. He has no choice. I have no choice.
A knock on the door snaps my attention. I drag my hands down my cheeks and exhale. Fuck. “Come on in!”
The door cracks open and Erica, the bubbliest of the RNs in my unit, pops in. “Hey Dr. Astor, do you have a second?”
Right now, no.
I need to figure out what the hell I’m going to do if I don’t actually get that studio, and how to stop feeling like a jagged razor blade is slicing my cells. “For my favorite nurse?” I say with a smile. “Always.”
Erica’s mouth twists and she gives me a pointed look. “You know nurses are worse than a church circle when it comes to gossip, right? So, you may want to stop telling everyone they’re your favorite. You might start some street fights if you aren’t careful.”
I laugh because Erica doesn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of my bad mood.
I rest my palm on the desk and lean forward, trying to focus on her and not my raging pulse that still hasn’t calmed down. “My money’s on you in a street fight. You can take them.”
That gets the expected grin. I always know how people will react around me. I anticipate, I read, I study them. I learn what makes them happy, what makes them tick. I know exactly what to do to make the nurses adore me, my family fear me, and the women around me soften.
Most women. Until Lexie.
Erica pushes open the door and a dozen or so of the nursing staff trickle into the office behind her singing Happy Birthday.
“Completely unfair, Erica. Next time I talk shit you have to warn me people can hear me.” I chuckle as the team serenades me, and the head nurse walks toward me with a candle-laden cake.
“You guys, this is too much. Really. Thank you. Is this chocolate? You all know the way to my heart, that’s for sure. ”
“You’ve officially left your twenties behind, Dr. Astor,” another nurse says as she cuts into the cake and slides pieces onto paper plates. “How does it feel to be thirty? Wiser than yesterday?”
“Hmm. Wiser might be a stretch. How about more tired?” This is not a lie.
My sleepless nights are getting worse, and last night I clocked maybe four hours.
I hit the gym twice, running and sweating and pumping until I nearly broke, and nothing alleviated the burn.
The time stretching from where I am to where I need to be is so fucking long and tight it’s going to snap.
I take a bite of the terrible cake and choke down the artificial coloring in the frosting. “Delicious. Thank you so much everyone,” I say, looking each one of them in the eye even though my mind is trapped on Lexie. “You all really know how to spoil me.”
The nurses gather around, asking about Annabelle and my “surprise” engagement that just hit the news last week.
I’m like a boxer in the ring dodging prodding questions about how I proposed, how I even met Annabelle—a Barlowe—if we’ll have kids right away and what my parents think.
I maintain a smile and keep my answers short and polite.
No one here wants to hear the unglamourous side of this proposal.
A year in the making. Lots of emotional torment.
Anna and I devising a plan. More lawyers than Depp’s defense team ironing out prenup details.
The conversation with her parents and the brisk phone call to mine letting them know what would most likely be covered on Page Six and possibly in the New York Times depending on the slowness of the news day.
People want to hear about the fantasy, indulge in the make-believe that feeds their inner romantic. So, yeah. I smile, I nod, I talk about how exciting it is. And I leave out everything else.
“I bet your parents are thrilled,” Erica says as she cuts into her cake with the side of her fork.
“You have no idea.” Thrilled is certainly one way to put it.
My mother will enjoy having a new daughter-in-law to parade in front of her friends. As for my father, he may be pleased that he’s gotten his way—but only because he has no idea what’s coming for him.
After I push my cake around enough on the plate to make it look like I ate more than I did while calculating the extra reps I’ll do tonight to offset this monstrosity, I order—playfully, of course—the staff back to work.
Once the door closes, my chest tightens. I grab my phone, knowing that I wouldn’t see a message from Michael pop up in the last twenty minutes, but checking anyway. The thud in my chest turns loud and angry, and I feel thick blood pumping through my veins.
I will do everything I can to stop Lexie from ruining my plans.
Including getting as close to her as possible.