46 - An Understatement

I didn’t have any revelatory dreams, at least not that night. I dreamt I was the CEO of Lush Productions, and I was running things all wrong. Instead of doing things the way George Lush had trained me, I was a clueless, brainless puppet, incapable of making my own decisions.

In the dream, it was usually George and Lucinda who guided me, but they weren’t there. The company was losing money, and the stock was plummeting, so I turned to illegal means to gain funds. In the dream, it was me who started money laundering and embezzling, and I ended up in prison. I woke after dreaming I died in prison, old and gray.

“Lovely,” I muttered into my pillow, checking the time on the alarm clock next to the bed in Alex’s guest room. It was 6:50 a.m. But I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee drifted up from the downstairs kitchen, so I quickly changed into the clothes I’d brought and descended the stairs. Yawning, I stretched on the bottom step and rounded the corner into the kitchen. Nolan stood there in front of his coffee shop, looking as tired as I felt.

“Morning,” he said.

“Good morning. Is that regular or decaf?” I gestured to the coffee.

“We don’t allow decaf in this house.” He gave me a playfully stern look.

I grinned. “Good. I can’t survive on decaf. Do you have any creamer?”

He nodded. “It’s in the fridge.”

I strode to the large, stainless steel double-door refrigerator and peered inside. My favorite creamer, French vanilla, sat in the door. Now I knew where I got my vanilla obsession from. Pulling it out, I turned to find that Nolan had already poured me a cup of coffee. The bag of coffee grounds on the counter said it was the fancy, imported stuff.

“Thanks,” I said, pouring in the creamer until the liquid was the perfect shade of light brown. Stirring it with a spoon from the silverware drawer, I inhaled the delicious aroma and sighed.

“Of course. My home is your home,” Nolan said. “I’ll make breakfast soon, but I need to wake up first. I can be a bit grouchy in the mornings.”

I laughed. “You don’t seem grouchy to me.”

“That’s because this is the second cup of coffee.” He offered me a small smile. “I can’t believe your mother hid you from me.”

The sudden change in topic gave me pause. But then he continued. “It was by some stroke of luck—or coincidence—that you walked into my life. If I hadn’t married my late wife, then I wouldn’t have Alex. Without Alex, who knows if we would have found each other?”

I sipped my coffee. “Maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe it was fate.”

“Fate indeed. Well, whatever it was, I am glad to know you exist. I loved your mother. If she had told me she was pregnant, I would have abandoned my partying lifestyle and settled down with her. Think of all the years you could have grown up with a loving family.”

A twinge of grief made my heart skip a beat. Growing up in a healthy household instead of a toxic one would have been ideal, but my upbringing had also molded me into something stronger, forged in the fires of adversity. Also… “But then you wouldn’t have Alex,” I pointed out.

Nolan sighed. “You’re right. The boy is the light of my life, the only good thing I’ve done in this world. Besides you.” He set his mug down to gaze at me intently. “I know the revelation of your birth has come as a shock, and I saw the way you two looked at each other before you found out. I don’t want you to feel like this has to change things between you two. You’re not blood-related, and family gatherings are usually just Alex and me. You don’t have to feel like it will be awkward if you decide to pursue the connection that was already forming.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“I mean it. I’ve seen the way Alex stares. He adores you.”

I considered his words for a moment and nodded. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs. Alex descended in a wrinkled white tee and blue plaid pajama pants, stretching just as I had. The T-shirt lifted up to expose his abs, and I glanced away.

“I’ve already discussed this with him.” Nolan winked. “Now you both should talk.”

Nolan excused himself, and Alex entered the kitchen. “Hey,” Alex said sleepily.

“Hey yourself.” I smiled warmly at him.

“Talk,” Nolan mouthed as he exited the kitchen, giving me a knowing look. He was such a meddler.

“Is Dad on the whole ‘you two are good together’ thing again?” Alex asked, watching Nolan’s retreating form.

“He is.”

Alex rolled his eyes, but there was a question in his gaze. He looked like he wanted to say more, running a hand through his sandy-blond hair.

“Well, go on. Spit it out. You look like you’ll choke on the words you’re trying to swallow,” I said.

“What are your thoughts on … what he suggested?” Alex drew the words out, and I could feel a heavy weight settle in the air.

I considered what to say and how I felt about it all. “To be honest, I’m conflicted. It’s a lot to process, but I do enjoy spending time with you. We’ve grown close over the last few months, and I think it would hurt too much to simply break things off. Maybe we could try this out, and if it’s too awkward, we split amicably?”

Relief flooded Alex’s features, but he quickly smoothed them over and nodded. “I’d like that.”

* * *

After breakfast, Nolan and I were ready for our spy mission. Okay, so it was just entering Sean’s honorary office at Lush Productions to see what we could uncover. It had been Owen who’d suggested Sean be given his own office, and now I suspected he just wanted Sean closer to his and Max’s operations.

We spoke a bit on the drive to the building, and Nolan asked me some questions about myself in an attempt to get to know me better.

“What did you go to school for?” he asked.

“I attended university as a film student and graduated with honors with two degrees, one in film and the other in directing.” I thought back on my graduation day. Owen had already graduated with a single degree in marketing, but he’d come to support me. That was when he’d proposed, right after graduation. I was twenty-five.

Back then, I’d been ecstatic. We’d already known my parents wanted us to marry, but it hadn’t been official until then. I was a foolish young girl, so eager for a happy life together that I’d ignored every red flag. But I was no longer that girl, and I’d grown into a better woman—despite Owen. It was a testament to my growth that I was able to reject men’s advances until I was ready to move on.

“Two degrees?” Nolan asked. “Why am I not surprised? Your mother was highly intelligent, so it stands to reason you’d inherit her brains.”

I smiled. “Can you tell me more about you?”

“Of course. What would you like to know?” Nolan turned onto another street.

“How did you go from disowned and ostracized from the royals to the richest man in the city? You built an empire from the ground up. I want to know that story.”

Nolan stroked his short beard. “Well, a lot of it was pure luck. I made the right connections and took the skills I had to make a name for myself. After I built a relationship with several people through networking, I came up with a startup idea. It took off. That led to more income than we knew what to do with, so I invested the extra into owning more companies. Eventually, I bought the other partners out. And here we are.”

“Wow,” I said. Lush Productions did some investing, but we didn’t open other companies. We just built assets. Maybe we’d been doing it wrong.

And maybe the profits we should have been seeing were really being embezzled.

It made me sick to think about, so I focused on the road. We were turning into the underground parking lot for the building now, and we had a task to complete. No one would question me gaining access to any place in the building due to my position in the company, so we went straight to Sean’s office and locked the door behind us.

I walked to Sean’s computer, while Nolan opened several filing cabinets, trying to find any incriminating files.

“Dang it. It’s got a password,” I said.

“I’ve already thought of that,” Nolan replied, pulling a strange USB device out of his pocket. “This is a new technology one of my companies has been working on. It can unlock any device, even if it’s password-protected. We’re in talks of selling it to the government to be used in criminal investigations.”

“I didn’t know something like that was possible.”

“It wasn’t.” Handing me the device, he went back to the filing cabinet.

I plugged it into the desktop, and a chime sounded. The computer logged in as if by itself! “That’s handy,” I said.

Then I got to work, searching through any folder that looked out of place, whether it was labeled directly as something like “logs” or whether it was something obscure to throw people off. Eventually, I found the right folder, and oh my God….

“George and Lucinda’s names are in here!” I exclaimed. “And mine is, too. There are documents of transactions I know for a fact I never took part in. Different insurance policies and money laundering schemes. I’m not sure what to do about this.”

Nolan walked over and read the screen over my shoulder. “Sounds like your family may have been involved, and they may have implicated you—even if falsely—as a safeguard in case you ever found out and tried to prosecute.”

“What am I supposed to do? I can’t go to the police with this. They’ll arrest me, too!”

I knew how bad this looked for me, and I knew there was a very real possibility of me ending up in prison with the rest of them.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Nolan started. “This device has the ability to both copy and destroy files. I’m going to copy this hard drive, then I’ll press this button to wipe his hard drive, so it can never work again. No one will be able to use this against you, and we will be able to use whatever we need from these files to help us if we so choose.”

I nodded mutely, blown away by the new developments. Every time I thought these people couldn’t get any worse, they went and proved me wrong. I was so done with all of them.

“Breathe, Fay,” Nolan said gently. “It’s going to be okay.”

“Do you think these files exist anywhere else?” I asked.

Nolan pondered that for a moment. “I’m not sure. It would be foolish to keep multiple copies, but there’s really no way to tell.”

“They can’t get away with this.” My voice was a broken whisper.

“They won’t.”

Having found all we could in Sean’s office, we left. Numb, I let Nolan drive us back to his house, where we brainstormed how to move forward. When Alex returned from school, we filled him in. His jaw hardened the more we revealed until I was sure it would turn to stone.

“Well,” he said when we finished. “This sucks.”

Biggest understatement ever.