Begonia exposed our agreement for the world.
My phone won’t stop ringing. Not my personal phone, nor my office phone, nor my office cell. Every line, lit up.
Merriweather brought coffee, doctored with sugar and cream and cinnamon, and I nearly threw up just sniffing it, which might’ve been the point.
Reasonably certain she’s on Team Begonia, that she’s sniffed out that we’re no longer together, and that I’m in the doghouse.
Winnie delivered today’s calendar and I wanted to crawl under my desk and hide like a five-year-old.
And then my father marched through my door, unannounced, with a tabloid in hand, and set off the biggest bomb of my Monday morning.
“While this has all the makings of a quality Razzle Dazzle film, I didn’t expect you’d do it in real life,” he says dryly, one ankle crossed over his knee as he sits across from me on my office couch as if this is a casual social visit and not a trip to tell me what a fuck-up I am for getting caught with my dick out in public before being exposed for Begonia being nothing more than a pretend date. “Maybe next time, use a digital document instead of paper. Especially if your fake girlfriend isn’t tech-savvy enough to forward it.”
She fucking betrayed me.
But what did I deserve?
She told me she loved me, and I told the pilot to turn the plane around.
“I’ll issue apologies.” My voice is hollow in my own ears. “If you need me to resign—”
“We’re held to a ridiculous standard, Hayes. If our family looks merely mortal in the press from time to time, we’ll weather the storm.”
“This isn’t mortal. This is embarrassing.” And it hurts.
It fucking hurts.
“It will blow over,” my father says.
As if this could possibly just blow over.
I glower at him.
I get a mild smile in return.
It makes my ears want to pop off the side of my head to let the pressure out. “For nearly forty damn years, I’ve bent over backwards to keep from smearing our family’s name, and now, with a photo of me getting a goddamn blow job on the front page of every tabloid, accompanied by a goddamn fake relationship contract, all you have to say is it’ll blow over?”
He tilts his head as if he’s contemplating the question. As if he didn’t hear the part where I said a photo of me getting a goddamn blow job. As if there’s actually any doubt that he’s not taking this seriously enough. “You don’t enjoy working here, do you?”
“Did you fucking set me up?” I’m on my feet, shouting at my father for the first time in my adult life. My head is pounding even harder, my fingers half-numb, half-twitching, my chest getting hammered so hard by my heart that my lungs are in danger of being collateral damage when it bursts. “Did you set me up so I’d have to step down?”
He doesn’t react to that either, but instead waves his hand casually as though he’s inviting me to take a seat and have a cigar. “Of course not. But since Thomas passed…you’ve been different. Some good. Some not so good. I don’t know what makes you happy, and your mother and I have been negligent by failing to ask.”
Begonia.
Begonia made me happy.
Until she betrayed me.
One good thing to come of this—I can be as unpleasant as I want, reject any potential date as rudely as I wish, and it can’t possibly be as bad as the front page of every last gossip magazine and website in the known universe today.
“It’s been a difficult time,” I bite off. “I’ll be fine.”
He nods to my desk, where the offensive newspaper glares at both of us. “That’s quite the balance sheet collection.”
“I like puzzles.”
“Especially when you’re unhappy.”
“I’m not—” I cut myself off with a curse.
While the show my family puts on for the world is fake, and they annoy the ever-loving shit out of me on occasion, my parents’ concern for Jonas and me has always been real. I’ve never doubted that.
They ask for too much—not because they want to, but because of the world we live in—but they worry in equal amounts.
It’s why my mother came to Maine—because she worries. It’s why the whole family stayed longer than they should’ve at the house in Albany.
I’m the one they worry about. Even at almost forty years old. And for as much as I don’t like people, I know I need them, and I know I can count on my family.
I sink back into my seat and meet my father’s gaze. “I don’t know that I’m built to be Razzle Dazzle’s CFO.”