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My room suddenly tilts and everything starts moving, the sound banging in my ears. I’m not sure I heard him right.
“What on earth are you talking about?” This has to be a joke. A really expensive joke.
Harrison shakes his head. “That’s what I’m asking you. Tell me right now if you have a lawyer securing a huge payout for you!”
“How dare you, Harrison? How dare you? God. Look at you. Coming in here and accusing me with lies, while you are hiding some nefarious habit. Your dad told me you are hiding something.”
For the second time that day, the blood drains from Harrison’s face. And then the fidgeting starts.
He wants to say something, but he changes his mind and walks out the door instead.
I’m angry.
I’m pissed.
I want to cry. No, I want to break something. I want to cry till my voice breaks.
One moment I’m dreaming of a happily-ever-after. Next, I’m thrown into this whirlwind of ugly revelations and stinging heartbreak.
Life sucks.
26
HARRISON
This is the third time this week I’m staying back at the office after work hours.
It’s not like I have anywhere better to be anyway. I’m closer than ever to making a break in our case and I feel like I just need one thing, one little fact to connect all the pieces together.
Drowning myself in work has kept me from going crazy this past week. A lot of painful things have happened and the only way I know to cope is to distract myself from thinking about them.
Was I being a fool with Charlee, yet again? I don’t know how gracious she can be toward my inconsistencies and stupidity any longer. I don’t even know what to think anymore. My father is the biggest manipulator I’ve ever seen and somehow, he managed to sow seeds into my head about Charlee being a gold digger. That’s the most unlikely thing in the world and I fell for it. I fell for it like a big fool.
I’ve felt like shit before in my life, but this past week, I’ve been feeling my absolute worst.
I wanted to stay away from Charlee for a bit after my earlier conversation with Dad in his office. Just to process the bullshit he said. For some reason, I tried to reach out to his lawyers to confirm his stupid stories but all top three guys weren’t answering my calls. I won’t put it past him to instruct them to ignore me when I reach out.
Eventually, I had to go to Charlee’s house. One of the things I’ve learned she loves to eat is this tangerine-flavored ice cream that’s literally the sourest thing in existence. It’s so sour it could make a normal person go blind. Charlee claims she hated it before, but now she eats it with genuine gusto.
Despite what I’d heard about her, I wanted to make her happy. To see her face, at least.
And then I saw her looking like a shadow of her former self with such puffy-red eyes. I couldn’t believe my father had been to her home, desecrated her hallway with his toxicity. He’d told her things about me that were not his place to tell, and in a weak attempt to defend myself, I lashed out and said awful things about an innocent woman.
My dad was right, after all.
I have a talent at messing my own life up. I haven’t spoken to Charlee since then. I’ve been calling and texting but she doesn’t respond. She requested an administrative leave for two weeks and HR signed it without my knowledge. I’m not sure I would have approved it if I had seen it, considering the fact that my father could muster up enough wickedness to draft her a resignation letter.
Her absence is affecting me so badly that I’m no longer sleeping at night.
So, here I am, sitting in the office when it’s almost dark, sifting through files brought over by one of our private investigators. Sometimes, I insist on looking over their collected details. I know my family and business dealings more intimately than they could ever understand.
I’ve been at this pile since the beginning of the week and I’ve dug in deep, catching details that are never actually actionable.
For instance, a reporter allegedly met up with Hayes. She was followed. Pictures were taken. However, it wasn’t the man himself. It was an associate with a different name.
In another instance, an IP address popped up, and one of our hackers swore on his life that it came from Hayes’s phone. It pinged off a tower in Harlem, and my P.Is tracked it to a location. Big bummer, but the cell had pinged at a coffee shop with no security cameras.
There are a dozen other half-promising, later-disappointing discoveries that leave me deeply exhausted.
