Return Billionaire to Sender

by Annika Martin

  28

  Malcolm

  * * *

  “Out,” I point at the door, stunned at the steadiness of my arm. “Out.”

  She stands there, blinking. Caught out.

  The one person who looked at me and saw something more than a villain. Or so I imagined.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “Malcolm…”

  She’s babbling on, but the whoosh in my ears drowns out her words. Like a fool, I let her in. I thought she saw something good, somebody worth caring about.

  I thought she saw somebody worth sticking around for.

  Now I want to burn down the world.

  “Go,” I say.

  “Malcolm,” she says, wringing her hands.

  The longer she stays and pretends to care, the more it hurts. It never was true or real—I just very badly wanted it to be.

  “You might want to hurry,” I add. “The eviction and demolition timetable seems to have been sped up. The building comes down in three weeks.”

  “What?” the blood drains from her face. “I thought we had nine or ten…”

  “Not anymore,” I announce with a calm that I don’t feel. I’m raging inside. I’d tear down that building with my bare hands, brick by brick, if I could.

  “Please, you can’t—”

  “Can’t what?” I ask. “Oh, dear. Am I displaying a lack of empathy?”

  “I get it, you’re angry, but we’ll all be on the street! This isn’t you.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong—it’s exactly me.” Again, I point at the door. “Should we make it two weeks? Or are you going to get out?”

  “No, please—” She backs toward the door, begging me with her eyes. She lets herself out. And I’m alone with our crumpled dreams in my fist.

  News flash: When something’s too good to be true, it probably is. This is a lesson I learned early on, but not well enough, apparently.

  I’d planned to stay in town a couple more days, working with my legal team and Gerrold’s team, but I have to get out. I have to get away from this place.

  Not an hour later I’m on my jet, heading back east, just me and the flight crew. They’ll have to double back to get everyone else.

  So be it.

  I gaze out the window as we rise above the cloud line, relieved to put distance between me and the coast.

  All I feel is empty, now.

  And coldness.

  And a little bit of hate.

  I hate the rush of excitement I felt whenever she’d walk into a room. I hate the wonder I felt when she turned down a million bucks. I hate that I ever found her refreshing.

  I don’t hate that I hit my father on her behalf, because any excuse to hit my father is a good one, but I hate myself for how deeply I absorbed her tenderness afterwards. Thinking it was about me.

  Like a fool. I hate feeling the fool.

  I hate that it’s not even a good building. Could it not at least be a grand building? She screwed me for it, after all.

  I hate that I’d started to look for hedgehog things, that I even began to like hedgehogs, just because she liked them.

  So that’s one silver lining—I can go back to hating hedgehogs. They really are unpleasant, stupid creatures, what with their ridiculous fur, not that you could even call it fur. What was it she said that she loves about them? Their optimism? They have quills, for crissake, always at the ready, prepared at any moment to prick people. Not exactly a sign of optimism.

  I hate that John and Maisey might have been in on it. I find that I very much hate that idea. Was any of it even real? John’s flowers in those coffee cans, were those just props? Their stupid bike rack meetings? The bullshit with the dryer-lint bandit?

  I hate that I had my architects redesign the building and the whole complex in a completely substandard way, and that when it was finished, instead of being disgusted with myself, I felt happy about it, imagining those ridiculous people being happy about it.

  I hate how much I loved her shy bravery. Her steadfastness. Her passion. Her loyalty. Her sense of humor.

  I hate that she made me feel like I was more than what I thought. Like we were more. Like I wasn’t alone.

  I hate that she made me happy.

  I’m back in my office the next day, handling all the things I should have been paying attention to while I was dealing with the Germantown Group and wasting time with Elle—or whatever her name is.

  Walt strolls in at around three, fresh off the plane. He’s got packets and schedules. He’s been coordinating with the city guys. I ask him how the flight went, and he seems surprised by the question. It isn’t the kind of question I typically ask, and being that I’m in the habit of not lying to myself, I’m fully aware that I want to know if she was on the plane.

  “Good,” he says. “Very smooth.”

  It’s rather maddening that he doesn’t simply tell me, so I follow up my question with another seemingly casual query as to whether everybody made the flight, jokingly asking if we’d left anybody behind.

  I finally get the information that I want—it seems Elle—or rather, Noelle, “Made her own way home.”

  “Made her own way home?” I ask.

  He shrugs; apparently that is the extent of his knowledge. So she didn’t take the company jet. As if that would make up for things.

  I waste additional time imagining her doing standby, floating around the airport like a ghost, dreaming of almond croissants. Because if there’s one thing I know about her, it’s that she doesn’t think ahead when it comes to food, constantly showing up places hungry. I once saw her eat a piece of fruit out of the lobby fruit bowl. What the hell was she spending her per diem on all the time we were there? That I’d like to know.

  My PR team comes in. They’re excited about these new developments. The boss of the group, a woman by the name of Wynn, is especially thrilled with the ambitious employee retention and retraining program.

  “People retrain work forces all the time,” I grumble. “It’s not that much of a coup.”

  “But you never do that,” she says. “It’s unexpectedly positive. The unexpected is always newsworthy, and accelerating a positive spin on a positive story is far easier than putting a positive spin on something outlandishly negative.”

  I smile, and she gets this worried look on her face. “Not that you always have outlandishly negative things to spin.”

  Just before the end of the business day, I get notice from Corman’s lawyers’ office that Bexley Partners has marked my training requirement as satisfactorily completed.

  29

  Noelle

  * * *

  I return home to discover that news of the accelerated eviction timeline landed well before my standby flight touched down at Kennedy.

  “What happened?” Francine asks the second I walk in the door. “They took away our ninety-day move-out window. We have less than a month!”

  “I am so sorry,” I say, dropping my bags. “He found out. Everything.”

  “Oh my god. Was he angry? Are you in trouble?”

  I wrap my arms around my middle, feeling utterly exhausted. Trouble isn’t the word. Crushed might be more like it. Destroyed. Guilty. What have I done?

  “Honey!” She comes to me and wraps me in a hug. Being that I have my arms around myself, it’s more like she’s hugging a mummy or maybe a large cocoon. “Whatever it is, we’re all in on this together,” she says, though that’s not true anymore. We’re getting dispersed like milkweed seeds in a tornado.

  I mumble a mummified thanks.

  “How did he find out?” she asks, letting me go.

  I wince. “I had to tell him.”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “What happened?”

  “Well, you know, it was going really well.”

  “You were getting him to watch that footage and everything,” she says.

  “It was so beyond that.” I give her the whole story. The thrill of our sessions. The magic of our secret relationship. The sense of
getting to know him, like finding a counterpart out in the world. Of falling for him so hard, my head spun.

  She blinks, stunned. “Sooooo…it wasn’t a fling. You were in a whole actual relationship with him.”

  I nod.

  “He seems so, opposite of you.”

  “Not in the important ways.” I sink down to the couch, exhausted. “For this little window of time, this span of a few weeks, Malcolm and I were in tune with each other in a way I never knew. You just can’t believe how we clicked. I know that’s a surprise, considering who he is, but I got to see this side of him that nobody else sees. And I loved that side of him. I loved all the sides of him.”

  “But, Noelle—he’s throwing us onto the street,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “So…maybe you’re better off without him?” she says. “As in, good riddance?”

  “You don’t know how bad I hurt him. I should have told him the truth as soon as things started happening, but I didn’t. I slept with him and got close to him. I let him fall for me while I was lying to him. The thing is, this is a man who doesn’t open up to people—not ever. He doesn’t need anybody. He doesn’t let anybody in. Except me. And now he thinks I was lying the whole time. Which I was.”

  “But you told him in the end.”

  “Too late.”

  Softly, she says, “People make mistakes. You have a good heart, Noelle—if he knew you at all, he’d know that.”

  I shake my head, picturing the misery on his face. The desolation in his gaze.

  “You went out there and you tried so hard to save our building,” she continues. “You went out on such a limb for the people you love…”

  “And I got us all evicted sooner. So…”

  “I’m so sorry.” She disappears into the kitchen. I hear our candy drawer open. She comes back with a full bar of chocolate almond toffee.

  “Thanks,” I say, ripping it open, though I can’t imagine how I could eat.

  “We’re proud of you,” she says, sinking down onto the couch next to me. “I mean, you had the papers in your hands. Oh my god, can you imagine? Rent-to-own condos and not being kicked out ever? But you were right to tell him. None of us could really be a hundred percent behind getting the building in a deceptive way. Even from Malcolm Blackberg.”

  I break off a piece and give it to her. She takes a bite. “Yum.”

  “Francine, I know you’re still imagining it,” I whisper. “Rent-to-own condos and not being kicked out ever.”

  “I am. But still, you couldn’t.”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t,” I say. “That and five bucks will get me a shitty frappuccino, huh?”

  Francine snorts softly. “Still, to throw us on the street to punish you? I mean, even John and Maisey? Who does that?”

  “Malcolm,” I say. “When you rip out his heart.”

  30

  Malcolm

  * * *

  One of the biggest mistakes I see out in the business world is people not having the stomach to do a thorough post-mortem when something goes wrong. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not easy to look a failure square in the eye, but it really is necessary if you’re ever going to get anywhere.

  Elle, of course, is a spectacular failure, a situation where I didn’t see something that was right in front of my nose.

  This is the reason that I give myself when I ferret out her mail delivery route. I need to understand this whole thing, right?

  It is the reason I give myself for deciding to do my work at a window table in a café on one of the streets her route takes her through. I take calls and type memos, keeping my gaze vaguely on the scene in front of me. After three hours of sitting there, I finally catch sight of her walking along in her blue uniform and summer shorts.

  I can’t tell her mood from her stride—I don’t know why I thought I would.

  She stops to talk to a shopkeeper, talking and smiling and backing up, trying to keep the conversation short while trying to be so polite. Comfortable in a uniform.

  I think about the butterfly tie. I never did get to pull it loose. Probably for the best.

  I thought that we had time. I imagined that once she wasn’t my coach anymore, we could officially date. I imagined finding a place to set down my chopper near her home in Jersey—that’s how we’d have shortened the distance at first, until I prevailed upon her to move into the city. But what do you know? She’s already living here—at 341 West 45th.

  Is this kind of post-mortem helpful to me? No.

  Yet somehow I keep on.

  A thorough post mortem is the excuse that I give myself when I order my accountant to send me a fully detailed itemization of her per diem. What was she spending her money on? The accountant I talk to tells me he’ll get the message to the per diem accountant. Apparently my corporation employs one accountant who deals exclusively with per diems.

  There’s no real reason for it but my car naturally goes past her place when I’m en route to certain destinations—my driver has a whole rubric of shortcuts that sometimes involve 45th Street. I make a point to neither stop nor encourage his driving past her place.

  But when he does drive past her place, it’s only natural that I look at it. Though I have to admit that I find it a bit maddening that I don’t know specifically which window is hers. I’m already looking at her building, why prevent myself from knowing this last detail?

  So I have somebody on my real estate team bird-dog that information—apartment number and window location.

  It turns out that knowing which set of windows belongs to her and her roommate, Francine, is not in any way helpful. In fact it only leads to more questions. When the windows are dark, I wonder if they’ve moved out, or are they just out for the night? And if so, what are they getting up to?

  When the windows are lit up, I wonder if it’s her alone up there, and what exactly is she doing? Is she with some guy? Showing him hedgehog things?

  Now and then I see people out front with boxes. I suppose it’s only natural; last week they thought they had ninety days to vacate the premises; now they have less than a month. No doubt my acceleration of the timetable has them scrambling, putting down deposits on whatever shitty flophouses they can find.

  I try not to think too hard about that. Or to wonder where John and Maisey might end up.

  Elle—or rather, Noelle—begged me not to punish the rest of the people in her building, and it’s exactly what I did.

  In my initial rage I assumed they were all in on making this stupid film for me, and I hated the idea of it, but upon rewatching the few videos that I’d had to download on my machine, it’s clear that these people aren’t acting, that they’re regular people in a documentary most likely created to commemorate their stupid little building.

  Were they angry with Noelle when they learned that she had that contract for saving their homes in her hands? That they would’ve been home free but for her fit of conscience?

  One evening, sitting alone in my penthouse in front of the spread my chef has left me with, I start entertaining the idea of restoring their ninety days. Moving up the demolition date was a rash, overly emotional decision; the project doesn’t need to kick off that quickly.

  I decide I’ll do just that in the morning, first thing when I get to the office. It feels like the right decision, and I eat with a kind of gusto I haven’t felt for a long time. It’s not just for John and Maisey—there are those first-floor twin boys who love their school. Mia, the cat suit one. Antonio.

  I wake up some hours later and think about sparing the entire building. Just keep it as a rental property, if nothing else. The idea gets my heart pounding dangerously hard. I’m imagining the relief and happiness that they would all feel. The relief and happiness that Noelle would feel.

  My delusions of saviordom fizzle out the next day in my office when I open up my inbox to find an email from my accounting team, getting back to me on Noelle’s per diem itemization. It turns out that she was usin
g the $150 daily stipend to buy Amazon gift cards and sending them to a man named Allen Junior who lives in New Jersey.

  My blood boils at this news. I can barely see straight, barely think straight. She was taking the money that my firm was providing her for her daily living expenses and sending it to some guy?

  I grit my teeth. Is this her boyfriend, then? From his picture he’s quite the looker. Was he in on the whole thing? Questions spin wildly through my mind. I can’t do my work with all of these angry questions, so I get my private investigator on the phone and set him on Allen Junior, because I just need to know.

  31

  Noelle

  * * *

  I repeat my story up and down the hall. My friends are supportive of my decision to tell him the truth, even though…ouch! And also there’s the stunning revelation of my fling with the big bad Malcolm Blackberg. How could I be with somebody like that? People are angry at Malcolm, and though they don’t say it, a few of the people I don’t know as well are frustrated with me.

  Maisey, the person who might just have the most to lose, turns out to be the most understanding.

  I’m telling her about what happened, explaining in my usual way which amounts to me saying that I couldn’t do that to him. I’m practically begging her to forgive me, when she stops me cold. “A building is just a collection of bricks,” she says. “It would’ve been wrong to keep the building through deceit. You have to look at yourself in the mirror. We all have to look ourselves in the mirror each day.”

  “It’s not really even like him to kick us all out,” I say. “I saw his beautiful heart. And then I whack-a-moled it right back into its hiding place.”

  “You still believe in him,” she observes.

  “I suppose I do,” I say.

  “Does he know?” she asks.