The Daughters Break the Rules

by Joanna Philbin

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  To JJ

  chapter 1

  Carina Jurgensen squeezed the rubber stress ball over and over, looking out the tinted window as their car sped across town. Her dad’s black Mercedes raced west on Forty-second Street, gliding over potholes and swerving past taxis, as sleek and fast as the Batmobile. They seemed to be headed straight toward the Lincoln Tunnel, which could only mean one thing: they were leaving Manhattan. As they blew past the glittering marquees of Times Square, Carina got the feeling that she was leaving for good.

  Beside her in the backseat, her father, Karl Jurgensen, tapped on his BlackBerry with his thumbs, his brows knitted in fierce concentration. From the moment they’d gotten in the car together, he hadn’t said a word, not even to their driver, Max. This, she knew, was a bad sign. Wherever they were headed, it was clear that her dad had already made all the arrangements. And he could do anything. That was the thing about having billions of dollars—nothing was impossible. If you wanted to whisk your only child out of New York City on an ordinary November night and make sure she was never seen or heard from again, you could do that. Nobody would stop you.

  Her best friends, Lizzie and Hudson, were probably just reaching her building right now. She’d texted them minutes before she left, and now the doorman would tell them that she’d just walked out with her dad and a duffel bag into a waiting car, and they’d panic. They’d been warning her about something like this for weeks. Carina pictured them in her lobby. Hudson would do that frenzied-pacing thing, and Lizzie would stare off into the distance and pull at her red curls, trying to figure out just how serious this was. Of course they’d start firing off texts and phone calls, but she wouldn’t get any of them. Her iPhone was in her bag, which was locked up in the trunk and completely out of reach. But she wouldn’t be able to talk to them anyway, not with her dad sitting so close to her, emitting a kind of cold rage she’d never felt from him before.

  “Where are we going?” she finally asked, daring to turn and look at him.

  Karl kept his eyes on his BlackBerry. From this angle, in the dim light of the backseat, Carina thought her forty-two-year-old dad could almost pass for a college kid. It helped that he still had a head of thick brown hair, albeit sprinkled with salt-and-pepper gray, and a strong, movie star’s jaw. His days rowing crew at Harvard had given him a lean, broad-shouldered physique, which he maintained with the help of a personal trainer and strict instructions to his chef.

  “Dad?” she asked again. “Can you just tell me?”

  Without bothering to look up, he shook his head. “You’ve lost the privilege of more information,” he said flatly, still typing.

  Carina felt her throat tighten with dread. She’d had plenty of fights with her dad over the years, but this was different. She was in serious trouble—the kind of trouble that could possibly alter her life forever, and not in a good way.

  It had all started in September, two months ago. They’d been in the middle of another silent dinner at the twenty-seat dining room table—he at one end, reading a stack of daily status reports on his company and e-mailing his minions on his ever-present BlackBerry; she at the other, doing her geometry homework and texting Lizzie and Hudson—when suddenly he’d said, “Put that away for a second. I’d like to speak with you.”

  She looked up to see his stern face, and a prickly sense of foreboding ran along her skin. The Jurg (as she and her friends called him) had no time for chitchat. His kind of talk usually fell into two categories: announcements and orders. Whatever he had to say sounded like both.

  “I’d like you to start coming into the office,” he said, his brown eyes boring into her like lasers from across the table. “Three days a week. Wednesdays and Fridays after school, and all day on Saturday. We’ll start from there.”

  “Come into your office?” Her voice bounced off the wood-paneled walls and floated up to the car-size crystal chandelier. “What for?”

  The Jurg steepled his hands. “You’re my sole heir, Carina. It’s time you learned about the world you’re going to inherit.”

  That world was Metronome Media, his empire of newspapers, magazines, cable television stations, and social networking websites. He’d started the company with one weekly newspaper when he was still at Harvard, and twenty years later, it had become the largest media conglomerate in the Western Hemisphere. One in three people read a Metronome publication or visited a Metronome-owned website every day. And all of this success had made the Jurg one of the richest men in the world. He owned five homes, a collection of vintage Jaguars, a fifty-foot yacht, a helicopter, a Gulfstream jet, and a collection of late twentieth-century art that rivaled the Guggenheim Museum’s. Celebrities, socialites, kings of small countries, and even the president called him on his private line. He’d even toyed with running for mayor once or twice, and then backed out at the last minute, much to Carina’s relief.

  “Dad, I know all about your world,” Carina said, looking him straight in the eye. “And I don’t want to inherit it.”

  The Jurg gave her a grave stare. “Isn’t it a little too soon to know that already? You’re fourteen. You don’t know what you want. And honestly, this is better than having you come into the business when you’re twenty-two,” he said. “By the time you’re out of Wharton you’ll be completely prepared.”

  “I’m going to Wharton?” she asked.

  “You used to love to come into my office when you were a little girl,” he continued, slicing into his steak. “Don’t you remember? Sitting in my chair? Pretending to hold a meeting in the conference room?”

  “I was eight. I liked playing with American Girl dolls, too.”

  “Carina, I was your age when I had my first job,” he said, more seriously. “Delivering newspapers. Now, I’m not asking you to have a paper route. What I’m asking is a few hours a week.”

  “But I have other stuff going on,” she said, sitting up straight in her chair. “I’m the captain of the JV soccer team this year. Did you know that? And I already signed up for Model UN. And what about going to Montauk on the weekends? What about surfing? What about hanging out with my friends?”

  Her father put down his fork and a faint, exasperated sigh escaped his lips. “Carina, soccer and Model UN are extracurriculars,” he said. “They’re not your future.”

  Before she could respond, the door to the kitchen swung open and Marco walked in. He was dressed in the khakis and polo shirt that the Jurg made all of his help wear, and his sneakers barely made a sound on the wood floor.

  “You have a phone call, sir,” he said in his quiet, deferential voice. “Tokyo.”

  The Jurg took one last sip of his iced tea—he never drank alcohol—and stood up, dropping his silk napkin on the table. “You’ll start next week,” he said decisively, and walked out.

  Carina sat for a moment in the empty dining room, and then pushed her heavy wood chair back from the table. So it was finally official, she realized. Her dad had no clue who she was.

  For the past four years, ever since her parents’ divorce, she and the Jurg had lived together like roommates who were determined not to be friends. They avoided each other in the halls, made polite conversation when they had to, and generally pretended the other person wasn’t living there. Even though they had dinner together at least twice a week, it was usually silent, with both of them texting or e-mailing in between every mouthful. Carina learned to stick to “her” parts of the three-story penthouse: the den, the kitchen, and her bedroom. There was one obvious perk to all this: most of the time, she could come and go as she pleased, with only Otto, the security guard at the front door, keeping
tabs on her. Unlike her friends Lizzie and Hudson, whose parents were sometimes too involved in their daughters’ lives.

  But sometimes the distance between her and the Jurg was depressing. He didn’t know a thing about her, and he didn’t ask. Weren’t fathers supposed to know certain things about their kids, or at least want to know? For instance, he had no idea how much she loved to surf the waves at Honolua Bay, or how she couldn’t wait to turn eighteen so she could go on Outward Bound’s Patagonia trip, or how she had recurring dreams of finally beating Sacred Heart in the soccer championships and being hoisted on the shoulders of her teammates like in some corny sports movie.

  But the Jurg had no time for details like this. He marched through the apartment always on his way to something else: the office, a meeting, a workout. He lived his life on a schedule. And there were no slots for her.

  And now the fact that he wanted her to “learn the business” only proved how little he knew about her. True, she didn’t exactly have a specific life plan yet, aside from taking a year off before college to surf Fiji and then become a certified Outward Bound instructor. But she did know one thing: she would never be a businessperson. She couldn’t care less about making money. Or money, in general. And the idea of being around her cold, preoccupied, money-obsessed dad every day for the rest of her life was not an option.

  In the days that followed, she pretended to forget their dinnertime talk. It wasn’t like her dad was going to make her work for him. But she knew from experience that when the Jurg said that he wanted something to happen, there was little besides a bomb or an act of God that could actually stop it. After a few more stony looks across the dining room table and unsubtle hints—like having his assistant call her to arrange an ID card—she gave up her spot on the soccer team, withdrew from Model UN, and went to his office.

  As she expected, the work was mind-numbingly boring. All she did was Xerox status reports, memos, and charts of sales figures, none of which made sense. Just like at home, her dad was nowhere to be seen. Instead he’d stuck her with his chief operating officer, Ed Bracken, whom she’d nicknamed the Anteater and Creepy Manservant. Creepy Manservant was in his fifties and had greasy thinning hair, a clammy handshake, and a shuffling walk. He sucked up to the Jurg so much that Carina couldn’t believe her eyes half the time. She thought her dad would have been better off with a twenty-five-year-old super-hot MBA grad, or at least a guy who didn’t still live with his mother. But Creepy Manservant was by the Jurg’s side twenty-four seven, and now she had to answer to him. It was awful.

  But even worse than the boredom and Ed Bracken was the sense that her future was slowly closing in around her. As she sat in a small office in her dad’s sterile, glass-walled skyscraper, forty floors above Times Square, she felt as trapped as if she were in a stuck elevator. Nothing she wanted to do or learn or try would ever matter. Her entire life was already mapped out, and she was marching in a straight line toward one, and only one, end point: to be her father’s Mini-Me.

  And then one quiet Saturday morning at the end of September, she came across the memo that changed everything.

  It was about Jurgensenland, her father’s annual charity event. Every Labor Day weekend, he turned the grounds of his Montauk estate into an amusement park, complete with spinning teacups, a Ferris wheel, an underwater submarine ride in one of his lakes, and a huge ball at night that cost ten thousand dollars a ticket. All of the proceeds went to Oxfam, the charity devoted to solving poverty and hunger. The Jurg had grown up poor in rural Pennsylvania and knew what it was like to go hungry. Whenever Carina worried that her dad had turned into a shameless moneymaking machine, she always took comfort in his charity work. Finding a solution had become one of his causes. When she saw Re: Jurgensenland in the subject line, she picked up the memo from the tray on Ed Bracken’s desk. It was from her dad’s accountant. It explained that the most recent event had raised three million dollars, but then she read:

  Of this, $2M will go directly to the aforementioned charity. The remaining $1M will be diverted as discussed for Karl Jurgensen’s other use.

  Other use. She read the words over and over again. At first she didn’t understand what they meant. And then it began to sink in.

  He’s keeping the money, she realized as a chill went over her. He’s cheating the charity.

  The more she thought about it, it began to make sense. It wouldn’t be the first time her dad had cheated. While her mom had never told her that he’d been with another woman, she’d pieced enough together to explain their divorce. As she stood there in Ed’s office with the memo in her hand, her thoughts flashed back to a night when she was ten years old, listening to her parents behind the closed bedroom door, her mother sobbing, her father yelling at the top of his lungs that I can do whatever I damn well want; you deserve it if you’re going to be so selfish.

  She looked behind her, out the door to Ed’s office. His assistant had stepped away from her desk. She knew that she didn’t have much time.

  Quickly she walked the memo down to the copy room. Without stopping to think about it, she placed it on the glass, shut the top cover, and pressed Start. The copy spit out of the machine. A few seconds later she snuck the original back into the file folder and put it in the tray on Ed’s desk. Then she folded the copy and stuck it in her messenger bag.

  For the next six weeks, she kept the memo in the desk in her bedroom, hidden under her passport and her certification from scuba school. But she thought about it constantly. She talked about it with Lizzie and Hudson. And each night she lay in bed, wondering what would happen if she let it slip out into the world—say, over the Internet. She could always do that if things got really bad.

  And then at the beginning of November, things got really bad.

  “Ed says that you’re not applying yourself,” her father said one night after he called her into his office. He leaned back and forth in his swivel chair, stony-faced, and tapped his index finger on his lips, which was code for I’ve Had It. “He says that most of the time you’re there, you’re shopping on the Internet. Or that you skulk around, looking bored. And one time he found you asleep on the couch in your office.”

  She grabbed a rubber stress ball from his desk and started squeezing it. “It’s not my fault if there isn’t a lot for me to do,” she said defensively.

  “Then you find something to do,” the Jurg snapped. “You walk around. You sit in on meetings. Damn it, Carina, you have to apply yourself here. I can’t do everything for you. You’re supposed to be learning something here.”

  “Well, if you’re so concerned about me learning something then why is your creepy manservant the one in charge of me?” she snapped back, feeling the sting of tears in her eyes.

  “Because I have a company to run.” He looked down at the stack of papers in front of him and shook his head. “This isn’t a joke. I thought you were mature enough to know how to behave. This is my company. I guess I overestimated you.”

  Something that felt painful lodged itself in her throat. She was only trying to please him with this dumb internship, she thought. And now she was being criticized? It wasn’t fair.

  “Just don’t embarrass me,” he added, giving her a hard stare. “You’re my daughter. Remember that.” He uncapped his pen and returned to his work. “You can go now.”

  She wheeled around and stalked out of the room, too furious to cry. So it wasn’t enough that she’d given up everything she loved to do. It wasn’t enough that she’d sacrificed her Saturdays—and her social life. Now he was going to yell at her, too?

  When she got to her room, she ran to her desk and opened the drawer. If she’d had any scruples about sending the Jurgensenland memo into cyberspace, they were gone now. Her dad was anything but a do-gooder. He was a jerk and a cheat, and she didn’t care if the entire world knew it.

  The next day, she scanned the memo into one of the Macs in the Chadwick computer lab and then wrote a sinister e-mail:

  To Whom It May Co
ncern:

  I have reason to believe that Karl Jurgensen, net worth $225 billion, may not be handing over all the money he raised from his last Jurgensenland charity event. Please see the attached document for proof. Thank you so much.

  She created a fake e-mail address, using just her first initial and her middle name as ID. And then with one click, she sent it right to the Smoking Gun, a website known for breaking news stories—and exposing the secrets of the rich and famous. She left the lab and headed to Spanish, feeling very calm and satisfied, as though she’d had a great run. Finally, she’d gotten back at him.

  When she got home from school a few hours later, she checked the website on her MacBook Air. The story was already up. A headline in big fire engine–red letters made her gulp: DO-GOODING BILLIONAIRE A THIEF? SEE THE DOCUMENT THAT MAY PROVE IT. Below it was the memo. Beside it, a caption called it a “scathing indictment” from an “unnamed source” within Karl Jurgensen’s “inner circle.” The words Karl Jurgensen’s other use were highlighted and blown up, just in case people missed it.

  Carina sat on her bed, staring at the screen of her laptop, her mouth open. She felt an immediate need to take it back. But she couldn’t. She’d done it. There was no going back. Now it was up there, for the whole world to see…

  She jumped as her bedroom door burst open. There, in the doorway, out of breath and red-faced, stood her dad. His jacket was off, the knot of his navy-blue-and-white-striped tie was askew, and his normally slicked-back hair was hanging in pieces over his forehead. He looked like he’d just run forty blocks. She’d never seen him look this upset before. He knew.

  “Get your things,” he said, still panting. “We’re leaving. You have ten minutes.”

  “Where… where are we going?” she managed to ask. She was almost too stunned to talk.

  “Ten minutes,” he repeated, and then stormed out, leaving her door wide open as he disappeared down the hall.