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He told me. The number he quoted was so huge that even if I grabbed a plane and sacks full of dollar bills and spent a month dumping money into the Pacific, I wouldn't have come close to making a dent in what he'd wasted.
I sat and stared at him some more. “Are you for real? Jesus Christ, meth-heads are better at money than you. What the hell is wrong with you?”
He just shook his head and I realized that was all I was going to get out of him.
I leaned back, reeling. “Why don't you guys declare bankruptcy?”
“Because... it's my life, Felicia.” I flinched at my name. “I can still fix it, I just need enough capital. And I could cook some books and get it, but...” He trailed off. “Your mother should have started chemo last week. But I can't afford it. Every bill is past due, my credit is tapped out, and I dropped the insurance a few months ago to free up some money...”
This couldn't be real. No one could have been this stupid.
“So it's just pride that's keeping you from saving mom.” I stared at him, cold with fury. If he wanted to ruin his own life, well, he was welcome to it, but to drag mom down with him... I couldn't stand it.
“No,” he said, and he finally looked up at me. “No, I have a plan. I have a backer. Someone who believes in my vision. I can get it done, but I need his help. And... there's a condition.”
I had an oddly clear premonition. “This is one of those Indecent Proposal things, isn't it?” I said. My voice was too loud. Heads turned in our direction. “Holy shit. I'm your daughter.”
“No!” he said, his face flushing, his eyes darting this way and that. “No, it's not like that.”
“What, I have to sleep with him and he'll give you a million dollars and I'll see diddly? Is that it?”
“No! It's...” He turned to his omnipresent briefcase, popped it open, and pulled out a contract as thick as a paperback book. He extended it to me, but when I just stared at him, he set it on the table between us.
“It's a marriage proposal,” he said.
I started to laugh. “Oh my god. Oh my god. You were always such a humorless dick, I thought you were serious there for a while!” It still wasn't very funny—joking around about cancer was a seriously shit thing to do—but the relief I felt was so welcome that I felt I could forgive it. After all, if all his sins had been as relatively innocent as a joke about cancer he would have practically been a shoo-in for heaven instead of the soulless earth-bound lich he was.
“It's not a joke,” he said quietly.
I stopped laughing.
“Who's this backer?” I said. Visions of his usual colleagues danced through my head. Getting married to one of the corporate aristocracy was probably on my bucket list somewhere between eat bucket of toenails and break own kneecaps with ball-peen hammer.
He took a deep breath. “Anton Waters.”
My eyebrows lifted so far they were in danger of wandering into my hair.
“The Anton Waters?” It was too absurd to be real.
I looked at the contract in front of me, and sure enough, there was his name. Anton K. Waters. A man I'd only read about in magazines and heard about on tv and in idle gossip in online forums. The ruthless, powerful, and boringly attractive lord of Empire Capital, one of the biggest corporations in existence. He'd risen to prominence from nowhere over the short course of ten years until he was on the top of the heap, leaving the bodies of competitors and colleagues alike in his wake. Anyone who got in his way was disposed of without ceremony or even, it was said, emotion.
Or so I'd heard. And I'd heard a lot. Lately no one could shut the hell up about him for more than five seconds. He'd been on all the major magazine covers, sometimes twice, and even in my relatively television-free existence every other news report I'd happened to catch seemed to mention him in some way.
And here was a marriage contract, like something out of the nineteenth century, staring at me. With his name on it.
What's the catch? I wondered. Because there had to be a catch. There was no way a guy like Anton Waters needed an arranged marriage to get him hitched. He made money and fucked bitches. Probably. That's what young, powerful, rich, handsome men did. My father had been one, once.
And look where it got him.
And mom, a little voice whispered. Look where mom is now.
I licked my lips. “What's in this contract?” I said.
“You'll want a lawyer to go over it with you,” he said, “but it's like a prenup.”
A prenup. Right. “And what business does Anton Waters have asking for an arranged marriage?”
My father looked away. “I don't know. He said his reasons were his own. You don't have to sign it. You can walk away. It's merely a condition for his backing.” Walk away and leave your mother to die. The implication hung in the air between us.
