Most Eligible Billionaire

by Annika Martin

  “You’ve been such a good friend,” I say. “Trust me. It’s better this way. A storm could be coming.”

  I make her come over to my space and look at my toolboxes to see if there are any tools she wants. I’ve got some great ones she can use for inlays and fine work.

  “I hate this,” she says. “It’s morbid. You’ve been collecting these for years. You have to take them.”

  “I’m going on a plane with a dog and a teenager. I can’t take my tools, too.”

  “How are you going to make jewelry?”

  I swallow. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m taking them all,” she declares with tears in her eyes. “And I’m keeping them for you for when you return. You belong here.”

  It’s a sweet thing to say, but in the back of my mind, I think, You don’t know about Vonda.

  On the way back, I have the Lyft drive along Central Park past Henry’s building. I make him stop across the street and I look up there, wanting to catch a glimpse of him. The kitchen light is on.

  Is Henry there? Is he celebrating?

  I wasn’t pretending.

  I’d be a fool to believe that. He lives for that company. He protects what’s his.

  I wasn’t pretending. We got this, Vicky.

  I sit there and let myself sink into the feeling of his words being true, like trying on a plush and beautiful coat that you can never afford but you want to feel it around you, and for a second, maybe you even believe.

  And it feels so good.

  Thirty-One

  One month later

  Henry

  * * *

  It’s three twenty-two in the morning and I’m lying in bed, thinking about her. Missing her.

  I build a lot of residential projects, create a lot of homes for people, but the home I found with Vicky was beyond anything even I could’ve dreamed up.

  Now it’s rubble.

  And not the cool kind you can turn into furniture. It’s toxic and twisted up with unbearable loss, not to mention anger with myself.

  And every time I see a griffin, or that ice cream she likes, or a mime, or a hundred other stupid things, that rubble pile gets deeper. And every time I get the urge to tell her some interesting news or a funny realization, I remember I can’t.

  And the pile gets deeper.

  Why did I listen to her when she told me not to go after her that day?

  Well, I know why. I wanted to give her a little space. I wanted to respect her in a way that the world hadn’t.

  Fool move.

  I underestimated the trauma that sixteen-year-old Vonda endured, underestimated how deeply it burned.

  A day later it was too late. She and Carly were gone. Vanished. When Vicky vanishes, she doesn’t mess around.

  I got the company, just like she said I would. I got it back—full control. Cold comfort.

  I pour myself a scotch and wander out onto my veranda where she fed me cookies and joked about tea cozies. I know what they are now. I looked it up.

  The night is mild for late October. I stare up at the moon, wondering if she might be looking at it this very moment. A cliché.

  It’s unlikely she’s moongazing. It’s probably daytime where she is; that’s what our PI thinks. He had a lead for Hong Kong. A few continental European cities. Nothing panned out.

  In the dark of the veranda, I open up my laptop. Before I even check my email, I click to a section of bookmarks that’s all jewelry. It’s a morbid ritual, perusing the latest debut designer collections of high-end boutiques around the world. I also look at solo designers.

  She wouldn’t be so stupid to start up her sequined dog bowtie business again. And she probably wouldn’t create that Smuck U line I so loved and hated, either, but she has to do something.

  She’s a maker—it’s in her bones—and women’s jewelry was her passion.

  She told me so many things. I could’ve told her about the hearing and the good cop thing, explain that I’d abandoned it. Was some little part of me holding all that back to protect my advantage? Covering my ass? Needing to arrange things to come off perfect to her? Not wanting to rock the boat of our time together? Not trusting her to understand?

  I click through collections. It’s not the names I’m looking at; it’s the pieces. I feel sure I’ll see a necklace or a pin or something, and I’ll recognize her vision in it, her sense of humor, her spirit—something essentially her bubbling up out of the pages of baubles, unmistakable as a fingerprint.

  I stay out there until dawn, clicking through the images. Then I switch to coffee and get ready to deal with the world.

  Over the next few weeks, Latrisha completes the cool-as-hell furnishings for the Moreno, and we collaborate on the installation and interior finishes. I make sure the website is updated with plenty of pictures, just so Vicky can see.

  Or should I call her Vonda? I don’t know, but what I do know is that she’ll check. She won’t be able to help herself.

  I throw myself into the Ten redesign. It feels good to do the place right. The neighbors are excited—we’re experimenting with bringing them into limited sections of the process. Maybe it’s arrogant, but I have this idea that one of these days, Vicky will pull up the website for that, too.

  I want her to see it. I want her to see that beautiful things can be real. Or maybe that real things can be beautiful.

  Not everything I do that autumn is noble. I have enough anger to go around, and my sights also happen to be set on Vicky’s mother and the Woodruffs.

  The New York Nightly Reports I-team is excited about the idea that I brought them for a news-hour segment about what really happened with Vonda O’Neil. Getting the salacious truth of the story. The mindfuck that everyone was wrong about her, and the opportunity to shame the true villains on camera.

  That’s how I find myself flying up to Deerville the week before Thanksgiving with a stack of cash—a hundred thousand, to be exact.

  I got the idea for this whole thing after Brett told me that he thinks the mother still has evidence. He figured it out from something Denny said to him about the Woodruffs having to keep her quiet.

  This little nugget doesn’t put him back in my good graces, but it’s a start.

  Maybe.

  The news crew is made up of Marv Jenkins, the on-camera personality, two camera operators, and a tech guy. The address they got for Vicky’s mother, Esme O’Neil, is wrong, but we track her down to a trailer park and then follow the bread crumbs from there to a poorly lit local bar.

  I recognize her right away, down at the end.

  She’s the skinny woman drinking alone, hair dyed red, skin wrinkled beyond her fifty-something years. She looks bewildered and angry when the lights and cameras fire up—it’s an ambush and a half.

  Newscaster Marv buys her a drink and coaxes her into repeating the lies on camera. My blood boils as she tells the world how surprised she was that her own daughter lied. She’d believed the girl—how would she know her own daughter turned out to be a liar? It’s a well-worn speech, calibrated for maximum sympathy.

  Her voice wavers when she meets my eyes. Does she feel my rage? Does she sense it’s the end of the road for her story?

  The cameras go off when she’s done. I step up and slap the cash onto the scratched wooden bar. Bundles of fifties. The Woodruffs were paying her, but probably in the low five figures. My money adds up to more.

  “Now you’ll tell the truth,” I say. “And after that, you’ll deliver the evidence you’re holding back. We know you have it.”

  She protests, but her gaze doesn’t leave that money. When she looks up at me, there’s defeat in her eyes, I know she’ll bite. She’ll take that money. She’ll sell herself out.

  Maybe I should have some compassion.

  She lost the love of her life and couldn’t cope.

  I get it. I’ve been there.

  I live there.

  The footage they gather is insane. Esme O’Neil takes us to a safety deposit
box where she has the shirt and a nanny cam—still inside a bear. There’s a cop along to keep the chain of evidence right. The footage inside the bear is Papa Woodruff and Denny bargaining with her for the shirt.

  We fire it up on a tablet. It’s captured perfectly. The money exchange is clear as day. “Helloooooo,” Marv says, sounding like a mustachioed, bathrobe-wearing porn star greeting his bedmate. “And with this, the story goes national.”

  They get Esme being sorry. They get actual lab shots of the shirt testing. It’s like one of those hidden treasure shows or something.

  The Woodruffs got a mayo-spattered shirt, as it turns out. You can never trust a drug addict.

  The news feature crew does a Denny ambush at a black-tie gala—they actually hold everything under wraps just to surprise him at the gala. They make him repeat the lie about how Vonda must have fixated on him, and how he doesn’t blame her for the lies.

  They run the footage on a phone for him. They get it on camera, him watching himself standing behind his dad in the sad O’Neil living room all those years ago, paying Vicky’s mother for the shirt.

  He calls it fake news and storms out of there, lawyering up soon after.

  There’s a simultaneous confrontation with the Woodruffs on their doorstep that night—the same doorstep they stood in when they announced they forgave Vonda and that they’d drop the charges.

  There’s nothing the public loves better than liars getting caught on camera.

  Marv and the I-team make it onto a sixty-minute news show, with the new material spliced up with old Vonda footage.

  The statute of limitations has run out on Denny’s crime as well as the cover-up, but there’s no statute of limitations in the hearts of the public.

  The story rips like wildfire through social media. Denny’s friends and client base dry up overnight. The Woodruffs are ostracized by all but the hugest assholes.

  Who knows, maybe they’ll try to sue Esme O’Neil. But she’s in rehab. It’s more than she deserves.

  She turned on her own child. A beautiful, honest girl who deserved love. Still does.

  She has it—from me. My love for her bounces uselessly off the moon.

  Thirty-Two

  Eleven months later ~ New York City

  Henry

  * * *

  I’m having drinks with Smitty, an old college friend, at one of the posh bars that cater to the Wall Street large-assets crowd.

  The bar is translucent green with hip lighting and successful, viciously beautiful men and women all around.

  The place is filling up. People come up to us now and then to say a quick hello. Locke is stronger than ever.

  It’s something.

  Smitty has his eye on a woman across the way at the booths. She has a friend for me. Things are pretty clear, let’s just say, but my heart’s not in it.

  “Henry,” Smitty says. “We could at least have a drink with them.”

  “You go.”

  “I can’t fuck them both. I mean, I could, but don’t think it’ll fly.”

  I point my finger into my empty glass, lit from the bottom from the glowing bar. If this place was any hipper—I don’t even know.

  The bartender comes over and fills it up.

  “When was the last time you had any?”

  “A minute ago, and it tasted utterly amazing,” I say.

  “You know what I mean,” Smitty says.

  The answer is a year and twenty-one days. It’s been a year and twenty-one days since I had sex. A year and twenty-one days since Vicky disappeared. Literally, she disappeared along with her sister.

  I try not to think what she’d say about my sex hiatus, how she’d rib me about losing my Most Eligible Bastard status.

  I’d do anything to get it back. To get back that invulnerability I had before Vicky came into my life. That time when everything with women was a game and I controlled the field.

  My PI hasn’t turned up jack. It’s a lot easier to hack through somebody’s fake identity than to scour the planet for a person who knows how to disappear.

  Last I heard, Denny was up to his eyeballs in debt, drinking heavily and trying to borrow money from the people he once snubbed for being beneath him.

  A spate of Where is Vonda? articles came out, but nobody ever found her.

  I still scour the jewelry collections, but nothing I see ever comes close to what she’d make. Nothing feels like her. Or maybe I'm just getting further away.

  So it's a year and twenty-one days, and I’m with Smitty, who really, really wants me to get with these two women—junior brokers, from the way they’re drinking.

  I give him my final answer. No. He groans and turns back to me, letting the two of them off the hook to troll for other guys.

  We talk a little bit more business, and then he asks me a strange question. “You put a bid in for that London thing?”

  “What London thing?”

  “The huge warehouse share studio—Redmond or something?”

  “I haven’t ever heard of it,” I say.

  “That’s weird. You have a UK presence. I would think Locke would be the first firm they’d invite to bid. It’s the kind of shit you guys have been getting off on lately. It’s some big cooperative makers space. Freaking huge. Reclaimed urban ruin, neighborhood integration…” He goes on to outline more features…familiar features. “We bid it, and it’s not even our thing.”

  I sit up. “Are there places to eat, sleep?” I describe the ideas I had for the Southfield Place Studio.

  He nods his head. “So you do know about it.”

  “The owner’s not named?”

  He gives me a funny look. “No.”

  “You have access to the RFP?” Request for proposal. I nod at his phone.

  “What? And let you bid against us if you weren’t even invited?”

  I nudge his phone toward him. “Forward me the RFP.”

  Thirty-Three

  London

  Vicky

  * * *

  It’s a rare sunny day in London. I step out from the funky share space where I have an office onto the street with Smuckers trailing behind.

  We skirt around puddles like pale mirrors on the pavement, reflecting gray skies and the gray buildings all around, and the colorful lights of signs. There’s a scent of diesel in the air, mixed with the sweetness of hops from a nearby microbrewery.

  We head up the street toward a bright-red phone box. A woman named Hanna converted it into a coffee booth—I was relieved there isn’t just tea here.

  “Hi, Veronica!” Hanna says.

  I tell her hi. I buy a muffin and coffee and hang around and talk to her, like I do every day. She always has a nice treat for Smuckers.

  I love the colorful, international bustle of London. I love my fun, fashionable neighbors at the office shared space, but I miss New York.

  The Vonda story broke after Christmas. My mom, of all things, found it in herself to confess and produce evidence that shows what the Woodruffs did to me. There’s speculation she was paid.

  It was a big TV news-hour-style story that got picked up all over—it even made the front page of the Washington Post.

  I cried when I watched it. And then I watched it again and again and again. And I just felt so clear. Like something painful inside me got washed clean in tears and rain.

  But, strangely, I didn’t want to go back.

  That thing that got washed and cleared is perfectly preserved, fragile in a nice ribbon. Going in front of the cameras as vindicated Vonda doesn’t appeal to me much more than going as hated Vonda.

  Maybe I’m tired.

  Carly is attending a great school, and she’s got a part in a musical on the West End that will be amazing on her résumé when she goes back to New York. I don’t want her to go, but she’ll be eighteen and done with school soon. I want her to be free to chase her dreams.

  I’m using the money I got from Locke as seed money to build my dream co-op studio in the ruins of a
n old warehouse. I’ve got a few investors lined up, and I’m in the process of quietly soliciting bids, blending elements of the Southfield studio with Henry’s vision and some ideas of my own.

  I try not to think of him too hard these days or about the way things ended with us. And how I loved to be with him.

  How he helped me remember who I was. I sometimes wonder if he had a hand in my mother’s one-eighty.

  I still don’t think he meant it when he said he wasn’t pretending. Or, at least, most of me doesn’t think he meant it. A tiny sliver of me thinks he did.

  But I still won’t reach out to him. Does that sound screwed up?

  It’s just that the memory of him saying he wasn’t faking his feelings for me is like a lottery ticket where you never go and check if you won. So you can never be disappointed that you lost. And when you look at it, you can think maybe it’s something good.

  The balsawood griffin sits up on my dresser like that, faithful and loyal and full of possibilities, as if there is still some magic in the world. Like a lottery ticket I never followed up on.

  I look at it when I wash dishes. When I make food. When I feel happy. When I feel unhappy.

  The studio keeps me busy. There will be subsidized spaces for artisans from all over the world. It’s exciting.

  I say goodbye to Hanna and head back to the share office with its hip interior of brick walls and green corrugated metal partitions between desk after desk. I make my way down to my area, saying hi here and there.

  I’m surprised to find a large box has been set in the middle of my desk where I have my inspiration photos scattered. It’s addressed to me. No indication of the sender.

  I ask the woman who sits next to me if she saw who brought it.