And like she said we would, we’re figuring it all out. The Green share price is recovering, the media storm is still intense, but we’re not on the front cover ofeverynewspaper anymore.
On the surface, everything is working out. Beneath? I’m fighting for air.
My father is missing. The FBI showed up here to arrest him, and he was nowhere to be found, nor has anyone seen a trace ofhim since. A team of private detectives and the FBI’s best can’t even catch his scent.
It’s driving me crazy, plaguing my sleep, squashing my appetite.
Oh, and I’m the CEO of an almost-billion-dollar company. TheFinancial Timescalled me Manhattan’s wunderkind, when my most tangible experience managing any kind of business was starting a restaurant chain onThe Simswith Charlotte and Mia.
I don’t think our “experimental” food restaurant even had walls or a roof.
I had a vague idea of how my life would look at twenty-three. I thought I’d be a fresh-faced architect, or running a smaller company I’d founded myself. Maybe I’d be traveling the world with no responsibilities.
I didn’t think I’d be a CEO with parental custody of my six sisters. Didn’t think I’d be trying to sneakily arrange my mom’s hospital visits or pay the nanny overtime while I’m stuck in a glass boardroom. Didn’t think I’d spend my evenings arguing with them over how much they hate having security following them around all day.
And despiteallthis, it’s a brown-eyed redhead that occupies the majority of my headspace. In the month since I last saw her, I’ve thought of little else.
In my father’s—my—office, a low sun bleeds out over the New York skyline, staining the wall in front of the desk a macabre shade of red.
The glass of the window is cool against my forehead, each heavy breath obscuring the busy comings and goings of a morning in the city. The light on the river is the same color as Ophelia’s hair.
I left her without a word.
To make looking in the mirror a more bearable process, I convince myself that my lawyers asking me not to contact Ophelia is the only reason the draft emails piling up on my laptop never get sent, but I know it isn’t true. There’s a part of me that thinks I don’t deserve her, and another part of me that’s hurt. One likes to remind me that I’ve turned her life into a mess of public attention and online hate, and the other plagues my nights with a question I wouldn’t dare to ask myself during the day.
Was any of it real?
I think I’ve accepted by now that Ophelia’s motivation for appearing in my life was so she could gather information, but it’s trying to imagine exactly when her feelings changed that’s keeping me awake into the early hours of the morning. Was it real when she lay beneath the sofa at Carmichael’s office? Was it real when I found her drowned at the tarn? Surely, it was real in the car on Boxing Day, when she held my gaze and gasped my name and made me feel like I was more than enough.
I really,really, need that to be real.
And beneath all of this is one tiny question, one I’m not even sure I have the right to ask.
How could she?I don’t know how that article got leaked to the media. Deep down, I struggle to believe it was her, but she wrote it, nonetheless. She must’ve known what it would do to my family when she typed it all up. It sent my father into a frenzy, throwing guns and clothes into a bag and threatening Fleur and the housekeeper when they tried to stop him from escaping. It’s put my sisters on the front page of every newspaper, every gossip forum.
What a mess.
Every time I shower and shave in the morning, I see a little more of my father looking back at me in the mirror.
I’m turning into him, like he always said I would. I can try to pretend I’m all my mother, soft and kind andgood, but the illusion is cracking. I’m fifty percent my father, and that’s a fact I’ll never be able to escape. Every positive thought has a shadow that trails behind it, biting at my heels no matter how fast I run.
I hate how naturally this role comes to me. How I can hear his voice guiding me through meetings, through finance reports, through tough negotiations.
He trained me to be a CEO, but I wish he’d taught me how to be a man.
There’s this sort of sickness that comes with money: The more you have, the more you crave it. We’ve always been rich, but when the zeroes started piling up on my father’s net worth, he became a different man. It’s an addiction. A total loss of sight of the important things.
Vacations stopped. Family dinners stopped. Christmas presents stopped. All the things heshould’vebeen doing with his money stopped. Everything went back into Green.
He traded his soul for the promise of more wealth. And for my sisters, I cannot let myself fall down the same hole.
Somewhere in the periphery, Jacqueline hovers in my doorway and clears her throat to read from her tablet. I’m only half listening, lazily sketching a female form on my notepad. Like all my sketches these days, it comes out looking like Ophelia. The gentle swell of her hips when she walks, the soft lines across her stomach when she sits, the muscles of her arms, they sit on my brain like a tattoo I can’t erase.
I’m incapable of producing a drawing that doesn’t curve, bend, flow in the same way that her body does. I love her. God, Iloveher, but maybe she was right. She and I are the right people in the wrong universe. It’s too messy, toocomplicated, like she always said it would be.
When I get home, when my sisters are in bed and my work laptop is off, there’s nothing to dilute her in my head. She becomes every thought I have and every shaky exhale I make. She’s the subject of my most rattling nightmares and my most carnal dreams.
Without her soft thighs, miserable cynicism, and runny nose, my life has faded back to gray. It would sting less if I hadn’t had a taste of how sweet the other colors could be.
