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“Not this time.” Sammy hangs her head between her hands, fingers massaging her temples. “She told me she was done. Completely done. I’ve never heard her talk like that before.” She groans. “And I can’t blame her, either. Why should she date me, and force herself back into a closet to do it? We can’t tell anyone we’re together. I can’t even bring her as a date to boring terrible dinners like this.” Sammy gestures at the hall around us with a rueful laugh. “My parents will never accept it. Never accept her.”
“I’m sorry.” I reach a hand across the table, and Sammy drops hers into mine briefly, squeezing once, hard.
“It is what it is,” she says, turning back toward the stage with a new, resolute set to her jaw. “Anyway. We were talking about the sorry state of your love life, not mine.”
I laugh again, though not without a pang. “I just… I feel like there’s some solution, I just can’t see it yet. Maybe it’s the company, or the way things were managed at her old branch… I mean, she talks about resenting my father and the way he runs this business a lot. Which, I can’t say that I blame her.”
Sammy snorts under her breath. “Me neither.” Then she turns a smirk on me. “Well, if that’s her complaint, at least she won’t have to deal with it for long, right?”
I blink in confusion. “What do you mean?”
Sammy lifts an eyebrow, clearly confused. “Well, because of the sale, I mean.”
“What sale?”
Now Sammy’s face goes pale, and her eyebrows both shoot skyward. She glances from me across the ballroom, to the other table where our parents are sequestered at a four-top. My father in his best suit, my mother in an evening gown that hugs her figure just closely enough to not quite be demure. Sammy’s parents in similar get-ups—her mother in a garish red dress that wouldn’t look out of place on a girl twenty years younger, but which on her, well, strikes me as a little ‘trying too hard.’ And then her father, in a suit that probably cost just as much as the one my father is wearing—which is to say, an obscene amount.
“They didn’t tell you?”
I glance from our parents to her and back again, a furrow appearing between my brows. “Tell me what?”
“About the merger.” Sammy’s eyes go wide as saucers, and she snatches up her not-so-dirty martini in order to down the rest in one long gulp. “Fuck, Bronson. I knew your dad didn’t exactly keep you tightly in the loop anymore, but this…” She shakes her head, and the look on her face, the way she’s acting, makes dread pool in my stomach.
“Sammy. What are you talking about?” I keep my voice low and steady, because otherwise I’m afraid I’m accidentally going to scream.
“Your father’s selling half of his shares. Giving up sole control of the company. He decided to go public, but he wanted to keep ownership within his close circle. So he’s selling half his shares to my father, giving my dad partial control over the bank… A lot of the branches are going to change ownership, though. My father’s getting half of the locations, and your father’s keeping the other half.” Sammy stares at me, frowning deeply. “You really didn’t know about any of this? I would have thought for sure your father would have to tell you; especially considering your current branch out in Santa Monica is the one my dad wants to turn into his new headquarters.”
I’m gaping at her now. Trading back and forth between staring at her in horror and then over my shoulder at our parents, chatting away at their table, a tabletop full of empty champagne glasses between them, all four laughing heartily at some dumb joke, I’m sure. Content in their plans, their futures.
The weight of this new knowledge sinks straight to my stomach. My father doesn’t trust me. He didn’t tell me about my own fucking branch.
“Wait.” I whirl back around to face Sammy. “Is this why my father’s so obsessed with making sure I don’t lose any more employees in the next few months? He issued some crazy ultimatum, told me if I fired or had any employees quit, he’d disinherit me once and for all.”
Sammy purses her lips, bobbing her head. “It would make sense. If he’s looking to make the branch look as successful as possible when he gives it to my father… My father agreed to take this branch over some of the more profitable ones, because your father convinced him Santa Monica has the most potential—it’s the oldest, most established branch, and it’s got enough space to grow…”
I groan, so long and loud that it turns into almost a growl. “Only because we’ve fired or lost the entire staff twice over this year—and loads more before that. Santa Monica is the branch we have the most difficulty with.”
Sammy laughs, but it’s not a happy sound. “That would explain it, then. Your father wants to unload his difficult properties on us, huh?”
“I guess so.” I clench my jaw. “Fucking hell, Sammy.”
“Confront him.” She leans back in her chair and crosses her legs, one arm draped over the empty seat beside her. “You have nothing to lose, right? He’s threatening to hinge your inheritance on the performance of this branch, and then he doesn’t even tell you what’s really going on with it. I’d be pissed.”
“I fucking am,” I mutter, fists balled. I spin to glare across the ballroom at my father’s table once more. “Look, Sammy—”
“Go,” she says, reading my mind with a rueful shake of her head. “There’s no point in you hanging out here getting drunk and angrier about it.”
“Thank you,” I say, gazing at her. “For telling me.”
She frowns. “Duh. What are fellow stuck-in-crappy-family-situation friends for?” She tilts her head up, calls after me before I can stride away from the table. “And good luck with Daisy. I’ve a feeling you guys are going to figure it out, one way or another.” She winks, and for some reason, maybe just because Sammy always seems so damned sure of herself, like she knows everything somehow, it does make me feel better.
Because it makes me realize where my priorities lie. “Thank you,” I repeat. “Tell Lyra I send my love.”
Sammy rolls her eyes, but she salutes, too. And I have a feeling that, if she’s right about Daisy and me, then I’m right about her and Lyra. Her girl will come around. Hopefully mine will, too.
“Bronson, can this wait? They’re about to announce the top donations for the month, and your mother’s going to need me there to support her when her name is called.” Dad’s half-turned toward the ballroom doors, wide open at the far end of the hallway I led him down, through which we can both hear the sound of applause spilling.
But I grip his elbow hard, to keep him focused on me. “Is it true?” I ask, my voice pitched low enough that none of the servers carrying trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres drifting past us will overhear what I’m saying.
“Is what true?” he replies, clearly irritated.
For once, I don’t care. “Are you selling my branch of the bank?”
His gaze zeroes in on mine, his eyes narrowing. “It’s not your branch, Bronson; it’s just the branch I assigned you to attempt to manage because I thought you couldn’t possibly screw up this simple of a job. But clearly I was wrong about that.”
I ignore the dig. “You should have told me.”
“Why? It’s not as though you showed any interest in this business before now. I had to drag you back into the company with threats and bribery, if you recall. Why should I entrust you with our innermost trade secrets?” He arches a brow, calm even in the face of being caught in his lies.
“Because you asked me to run this branch. You ordered me not to lose any employees—why, because it will make your new business partner less likely to agree to take on this dying branch of the bank for himself?” I lift an eyebrow back. Two can play this whole blank stare game.
“Yes,” my father replies simply. “That’s called a smart tactical move, Bronson. Something you might know if you’d bothered to attend business school the way you were supposed to. But god forbid you do anything you’re supposed to do. Your mother and I spend your whole life trying to teach you, but you nev
er listen to a single thing we say—”
“Are you kidding?” I interrupt, my voice rising. “I did everything you both asked of me. All through elementary school, high school, I let you dictate every single life decision I ever made. And did you ever once tell me you were proud of me, that you trusted me thanks to how reliable I was?”
“You were a child,” my father says. “Adults don’t trust children. We just expect them to follow the rules.”
“Well there were too many fucking rules,” I spit. “And too much distrust, too many lies.”
“How did I lie to you? I don’t see any problem with what I did.”
“This branch is a perfect example.” I fling an arm wide. “You didn’t tell me half the things I needed to know. You only shared the bare minimum.” In the back of my mind, I think about Daisy. About how much I hurt her by hiding what was going on. Maybe I didn’t actively lie to her, but I still hid things. That’s the same thing as lying. It is lying, even if it’s a lie by omission.
