Chapter 118: The Full Truth

Chapter 118: The Full Truth
"And that was the whole introduction, Val,” Max said it the way a person recounts a thing that happened rather than a thing that still hurts.
“Okay. I get it.”
“Then she left with her mother, and we went back to whatever we were doing,” Max added, “and that was mostly it for years."
"That's a terrible way to handle it."
"My father handled most things terribly," he said.
"Did you stay in touch with her after that?"
"Not really. We knew she existed. She knew we existed."
Valerie turned back to face the wall. "So what changed?"
"After my father died," he said, "she came back. She was older by then. Old enough to understand what had happened to his company, what it cost our family. Her mother had told her things. She showed up, and she said she wanted in."
"Into what?"
"Whatever I was building," he said. "She knew roughly what I was doing. Not the full scope, but enough. She said something was taken from her, too — her father, same as mine, even if the circumstances were different. She wanted to be part of it."
"And you let her."
"I gave her a role," he said, and then went quiet for a moment. "The job with Damon was mine to assign or not assign. I assigned it because she was right for it and she pushed for it, and I believed she could hold the line."
"And then she didn't," Valerie said. She pulled the robe a little tighter at the collar. "So what brought you together in the end?"
He looked at the window.
"Vengeance," he said. "Same thing that started all of it. It was the only thing we had in common."
After a while, they just sat there in silence. The comb had already done its job, but neither of them moved. The room was still warm, and it was quiet outside in the compound. The moment felt kind of fragile, like one wrong word could ruin it.
Valerie turned slowly on the bed until she was facing him. She pulled one leg up underneath her. Max watched her the whole time, then shifted his own position so he was turned toward her, too.
Now they were sitting across from each other on the bed in the dim light, close enough that she could see his face clearly.
"What did Damon actually do to you?" she finally said.
Max looked at her.
"I know it's personal," she said. "Whatever it is, it has to be. Nobody goes to the lengths you went to—Lindsay, you—for a business reason. Business reasons don't look like this."
He was quiet. He set the comb down on the bed beside him and looked at his hands for a moment, then at the wall, then back at her.
"No," he said. "They don't."
The silence stretched long enough that she thought he was going to close it off the way he usually did. But something in his face was different tonight.
"My grandfather built the Cardini," he said finally. "Not my father. My father was—" He paused. "My father was not the right kind of man for it. My grandfather knew that early, so he took me instead, starting to train me when I was young. The plan was always that it would come to me."
"Your father knew this?"
"Yes."
"How did he take it?"
"Badly," Max said. "For a while, and then he found other ways to occupy himself. He drank. He gambled. He had the affairs. He had his own business, separate from the Cardini—legitimate, mostly. It was doing well enough for a long time, which gave him the illusion that he didn't need what my grandfather had built."
Valerie listened.
"Then he got into debt," Max said. "Gambling debts at first, private ones, then bigger ones. He started making business decisions that didn't make sense. He borrowed from people he shouldn't have borrowed from. He signed things he didn't read carefully enough. I was busy, and I was far away, and I didn't see how bad it had gotten until it was already very bad."
"And Damon?" she said.
"Damon was one of his creditors," Max said. "Not the only one, but the most active one. He saw what my father was—saw the addiction, saw the desperation, saw a man making bad decisions from a position of weakness—and he used it. He didn't destroy my father directly. That would have been too obvious. He nudged. He tightened terms at the right moments. He introduced my father to the right people at the right time, people who would extend credit that had impossible conditions attached. He made it easy for my father to go further in when he should have been finding a way out."
"He manipulated everything," Valerie said.
"Over two years," Max said. "By the end, my father had nothing. The business was gone. The money was gone. Whatever he'd kept separate from the Cardini—gone. Soon, my mother was receiving threats." He looked at the window. "My father took his own life on a Tuesday morning. I was in Berlin when I got the call."
Valerie said nothing. There was nothing useful to say to that.
"The loss," Max said after a moment. "My father and I were not — we weren't close in the way some fathers and sons are. He resented me for what my grandfather chose. I understood that. But he was still my father, and there's a difference between a complicated relationship and no relationship at all. I could have carried the loss. That's what I told myself in the beginning. I could have grieved it and set it down and kept moving."
"But?" she said.
He looked at her.
"My mother," he said.
He said it simply, two words, and she felt the weight behind them immediately.
"She was—" He stopped then started again. "She was the kind of person who made a room better by being in it. She laughed easily. She paid attention to people, really paid attention, and they could feel it. She had this way of finding something worth smiling about in almost any situation, however bad. That's not who she is now."
"What happened to her?"
"The threats Damon made didn’t stop, though, pushing her over the edge. But my father’s death broke something," he said. "Whatever was holding her together—and I think part of it, a bigger part than I understood, was him, even with everything he was—when he was gone, it went with him." He was quiet for a moment. "She's still alive. She's somewhere safe, people taking care of her. But she hasn't been herself since. She doesn't laugh. She's somewhere behind her own eyes, and most days you can't reach her… like she died with him."
Valerie looked at him.
His face was still composed, but there was something around his eyes and in the set of his mouth that was different.