Now I was stuck in Miami because my brother had wrapped his car around a guardrail and my grandmother had decided that my freedom was less important than the family legacy.
My assistant, Trisha Park, was leaning against my car in the parking lot, drinking an iced coffee and scrolling through her tablet. She wore a blazer over a T-shirt that read “THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT SPREADSHEET,” and her reading glasses sat crooked on her nose. She didn’t look up when I approached.
“You have a two o’clock,” she said.
“Cancel it.”
“It’s not that kind of two o’clock.” She finally looked up, and her expression was the one she used when she was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear. I’d seen it enough times to recognize it on sight. “Your grandmother called. Again. She wants you at the hospital by three.”
“No.”
“She said, and I’m quoting directly, ‘Tell my grandson that his brother is his only sibling. He wants to see Christopher, and if he doesn’t show up by three, I will personally come to that film set and make a scene that’ll give the tabloids a month’s worth of entertainment.’” Trisha paused. “She also asked you to eat more. You’re too thin.”
“Hey, I’m not too thin,” I shot back.
Trisha didn’t even blink. “I’m just the messenger.” She took a sip of her coffee. “For what it’s worth, I think you should go.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t care what you think.”
“And yet you pay me to tell you anyway. Funny how that works.”
I got in the car. Trisha got in after me, settling into the passenger seat. She’d been with me for six years. Startedas a temp assistant when my previous manager got caught embezzling, and within three months she’d reorganized my entire schedule, fired two people who needed firing, and told me to my face that my public image wasone bad decision away from being unsalvageable.
I’d promoted her on the spot. Niceness wasn’t the point. She was right, and being right mattered more to me than being comfortable.
The drive to the hospital took forty minutes because Miami traffic existed solely to punish people who had places to be. Paradise, apparently, came with a forty-minute commute. I spent the first twenty minutes staring out the window, watching the city I grew up in slide past like a film I’d seen too many times. I knew every street. Every building. Every neighborhood where a different version of me had existed and been found lacking.
There, the private school where Dominic, my half-brother, was the star athlete and I was the kid who ate lunch alone in the library. There, the country club where Patrick Vale, my father, hosted charity galas and introduced Dominic to clients and business partners while I stood at the edge of the room, holding a glass of water nobody had offered me, wondering if anyone would notice if I left.
Nobody ever did.
And there. I looked away from the window. The house. The one I grew up in, if you could call it growing up. Fourteen thousand square feet of Italian marble, imported wood, and a family that treated me like an error they couldn’t delete.
My bedroom had been at the end of the east wing, the farthest room from the master suite, so far from the rest of the family that the housekeeper used to joke I lived in a different zip code. She stopped joking when she realized it wasn’t funny. It was the truth I lived with. Just my life.
My father’s method of parenting was simple:ignore me until I made a mistake, then make sure I understood the cost.I was eight the first time. Broke a vase in the hallway, one of Esmeralda’s aesthetic collections. An accident. A kid running where he shouldn’t have been running. My father grabbed my arm, walked me to the basement storage room, and locked the door.
Three hours. No light. No sound except my own breathing and the scurrying of something small behind the shelving unit.
When he let me out, he said, “Next time, be more careful.” Like it was a lesson. Like locking a child in the dark was just good parenting.
It happened again. And again. Each time for something different, something smaller. A spilled drink. A grade that wasn’t perfect. A look on my face that Esmeralda interpreted as disrespectful. She’d tell my father, and my father would walk me to the basement, and I’d stand in the dark counting the seconds until it was over.
Dominic knew. He had to have known. Our bedrooms were on the same floor, and you couldn’t miss the sound of a child crying behind a locked door if you were paying attention. But Dominic was golden. Dominic was the legitimate heir, the son Esmeralda bore, the one who belonged. And golden boys don’t risk their standing by defending the kid who doesn’t.
“You’re doing the thing again.” Trisha's voice brought me back to reality.
I turned from the window. She was watching me with a concern that she didn’t try to disguise this time.
“What thing?”
“The thousand-yard stare. You get it every time we drive through Coral Gables. We’re ten minutes out. You want me to come in?”
“No.”
“You want me to wait in the car?”
“Yes.”
