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“As if it isn’t now? I have been a wonderful steward of this family’s interests,” he protests.
“Ah, yes, the ever-growing pile of lawsuits from clients, customers, and partners alike say that,” I retort.
“Of course they’re unhappy. They want us to live like we’re commoners. They want to pretend they’re our equals. I stopped that. You want to settle with these people? Why don’t they go find better jobs, so they can afford better than some flooded out apartment? We are not a charity. We are a business. If they think it’s not fit for human occupation, fine. They should go find somewhere else to live.”
“Those apartments are not fit for any human occupation. The reports are damning. Would you to want to live there?”
“I would never be forced to make that kind of choice,” he sniffs.
“How do you know? Don’t you have the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine what it would be like if you were in them?” I ask in muted outrage. I just don’t understand where this man’s heart is. How he and my father were both raised by my grandparents is a mystery.
“Why would I want to imagine being them? How vulgar,” he says with a sniff of disgust.
He’s a lost cause. I just need to completely declaw him and then I’ll strip him of all his power and mandate his retirement from the board.
“You had fifteen years to do what you would. You sent me away. You made sure I stayed away. Perhaps you hoped I’d never come back. But here I am.”
“Yes, here you are,” he says with barely disguised malice.
“And here, I’ll stay.” I reinforce it with my own undisguised dislike. “You need to get used to it. Stop trying to undermine me; stop trying to make me feel like I have less right to be here than you do. I’m sorry you weren’t born first. But you need to start thinking about what your life could be,” I say with a heavy sigh.
He doesn’t respond. He just stares straight ahead in stony silence, his face completely mottled with his pent-up anger.
“I’ve rented you a unit in the Ivy,” I tell him weakly as I stand.
“No, we will not stay there. It would be an insult to the family’s honor,” he blurts through woodenly clenched teeth.
“How is it an insult?”
“They aren’t fit to be our neighbors. They’re commoners. That land was part of our dynasty,” he spits.
Loathing floods me in a rush of heat, and I don’t hide it when I look at him.
“We sold them that land. We took the money from it and made ourselves rich again. They even named it after us in a show of good faith. This one-sided feud is ridiculous. I’m not going to perpetuate it anymore.”
“My father would shudder to
see how you’ve degraded our dynasty,” he says.
I’ve had enough of his shit. I step into his personal space and look him in the eye.
“It’s a family, not a dynasty. We are commoners. Being richer than all of the monarchies combined doesn’t make you one by de facto. And thanks to your inability to delegate or manage the business yourself, we’re perilously close to being in debt. We’re just regular people. We’ll never reclaim any of the land we sold to the Wildes. If you’d had any real sense of what we needed, you would have embraced them.”
His face mottles, and his already thin lips compress to leave what looks like a white gash where his mouth should be. He leans forward, as tall and straight at age eighty as he’d been at sixty.
“We are kings in our own right.” His lips barely move. His eyes are hard and intense. “I will never embrace those bourgeoise hippies who don’t know the meaning of the word ‘empire’. The Riverses had assets on which the sun never set. The legacy you speak of is one that was built with my grandfather’s bare hands. And now you’re kicking me out so some royals can come and rent this house? Like it’s a fucking hotel?”
“It’s certainly not a home. And I’m done wasting resources to try and make it feel like one just so you have a free place to live. I’ve offered you an option. If you’d rather use your fixed income to rent a place elsewhere, you’re welcome to do it. But, either way, you and Aunt Mai and Eliza will have to be out of here by the time the embassy tenants are moving in.”
“I won’t go,” he says quietly.
“Yes, you will,” I tell him.
“No, I won’t. You’ll have to have me forcibly removed,” he says.
“Fine, if that’s what you want,” I say with a shrug.
“I’ll call the press,” he says, scrambling up to his feet when I start down the hall.
