Her father.
Her thoughts were stilted and incomplete. “The building?”
Again Margot shook her head. “They’re saying it was built cheap. Not quite up to code.” She shrugged and started to stand. But an aftershock shook them and she sat back down, waiting out the few seconds that seemed to stretch for minutes.
The two women sat side by side, silent, just being.
Finally, Margot asked, “What are the feathers?”
That, at least, earned a half smile. “They aren’t feathers–they’re ash.” Katharine picked a piece up and watched as it disintegrated in her hand, and then her smile fell apart. “Something yanked Allistair out of here, and this is all that’s left. Zachary came back just to laugh at me and tell me I had killed Allistair. I didn’t choose him, so he didn’t win… .” She barely held on. “He told me not to choose him.” It was then that she cracked in half.
She fell into Margot’s arms then and cried. Maybe for hours, she didn’t know. Her body shook with her sobs, sometimes making her wonder if aftershocks were shaking the building or if it was just her grief. It wasn’t important enough to ask.
CHAPTER 28
Somehow, three days later, Katharine was still alive.
No one had been able to find her father. He hadn’t answered his cell phone when she frantically called. No one had seen him since the earthquake; all anyone had been able to locate was the GPS on his car, and it was sending signals from the bottom of the rubble–right in the garage.
If his car was in the garage, he had most likely been in his office. He practically lived there since her mother had died. It seemed likely that he had died there, too.
Katharine resigned herself to the fact that he was gone.
Margot had taken a handful of days off work, not unusual in the aftermath of a large earthquake. She spent some time helping to re-shelve all the books, but her main job was to oversee the damages and file the insurance claims. She could do those things mostly from home, so she spent a good portion of her time helping Katharine try to find out anything more definitive about her father. Margot’s own family was far enough away to not be in any kind of danger. Liam was safe, but had gotten himself on a volunteer cleanup crew, which kept him pretty busy. And Margot had other friends she’d checked on.
Katharine had too. Though she might not have called them friends, there were a surprising number of people to call, to ask if they would call her if by chance they saw her father–and to let them know that she was reasonably certain he had fallen with the building.
It was on the third day, as she and Margot pulled up to look again at the rubble, that a worker came forward to talk to them. From the look on his face, whatever he had to say couldn’t be good. Katharine squeezed Margot’s hand while she heard the news.
Her father’s body had been pulled from the ruins. The only consolation in his death was that it had likely been quick, from a blow to the head.
And now she had something to bury.
Standing there, looking over the spot where the building had once stood, she could see beyond it and out to the ocean. The marina waters lapped in, coming up on the rocky edges of the land, meeting up with slips packed tight with boats both small and large. The sea was beyond the man-made barriers that bordered the marina, and it pushed and pulled out there. Inside, in the calmer, protected waters, they didn’t see or feel it that much.
The space left by Light & Geryon suddenly revealed all that it had kept hidden by its sheer size. Katharine wondered what else her father’s firm had tucked away from view all those years.
Blue sky and open water that was the same shade of mixed green, blue, and gray as her eyes beckoned to her. This was where something in her had come from so long ago, according to Allistair’s theories.
Though she was still cold and numb from all that had happened–she hadn’t felt anything since the freezing, blinding fear of Allistair and Zachary standing in front of her–she suddenly knew what she had to do.
Margot still held her hand tight in support as Katharine took her first real deep breath in days, as she thought for the first time of something beyond the demands of simply surviving the present. As Katharine began to plan, she smiled at how fitting it was that her friend was right beside her. But she didn’t say anything, just stood and watched the sea.
• • •
Hollow to her core, Katharine went through with the funeral for her father, with Toran Light at her side the whole time.
Uncle Toran hadn’t been at the building the day of the earthquake, but his world had been shaken anyway. He seemed not to know what to do without her father there–not with the business and certainly not with himself.
Katharine waited politely until the last guest, and even Margot, had cleared out after the reception before she sat him down and began talking. “Are you planning to reopen Light & Geryon?”
He simply looked at her, and from the way he did it, she knew he had already planned out what to say. And somehow it still surprised her.
“Only if you are the ‘Geryon’ part.”
She hated to break his heart, but she did it anyway. With a deep gulp of air, she took the plunge. “I can’t.”
He’d always been alternately grandfatherly and corporate. It was part of his charm, and how he’d accomplished most of what he had in his life. Now he seemed genuinely perplexed by her response. “But it’s what you know. It’s what your father would have wanted.”
She leaned back on the soft white leather couch. The very expensive couch. “Uncle Toran, I loved my father. But I am no longer doing what he wanted me to. I was finally becoming my own person, just before all this happened. I can’t change that because of this tragedy.”
“Yes, I remember you quit.” He, too, leaned back, and if he’d had a cigar, she was sure he would have rolled it between his fingers. “I thought you were just mad at your father. Maybe just being rebellious.”
Yes, he would think it was like that. He would believe that her leaving was her own flaw, obviously. It had to be a barb at her father; it couldn’t possibly be a rational, well-thought-out decision. Not if it didn’t agree with the two old men. And so this was where it got dicey.
“Did you know what we invested in, Uncle Toran?”
“Of course,” he blustered. “Everything went through your father and me for approval.”
“Then you knew about the diamond mines that were putting out families with no food and nowhere to go. They were working kids, and in unsafe conditions, too. Did you know we dumped a ton of money into cheap firing pins for guns? They tended to explode in the hands of the person holding the gun. We supported a paper mill that was poisoning the water and giving people cancers in three nearby towns. In each case, we made a ton of money.”
His face was red before she’d even finished talking. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about what Light & Geryon really did. What we funded, the things we made happen.”
As though a magic wand had been waved, his features suddenly smoothed over and his tone became condescending. “You’re mistaken, honey. That didn’t happen.”
“It did. I have evidence. And it’s why I won’t work for Light & Geryon again.”
She waited. Wanted to see what he would do. What offer he would put on the table. From what he’d said earlier, her refusal meant he was out of business too.
“I just don’t see any of that happening. If it did, I certainly didn’t know about it and neither did your father.” His hand ran down the front placket of his shirt in an absentminded gesture. All of it–the tone, the movements, the smooth assurance–said that if he hadn’t known about it, then it had nothing to do with him or his company. It couldn’t possibly be his responsibility.
She wanted to tell him more if not all of it. She wanted to say that her father had known, that she’d been there, had told him, and had been summarily dismissed. And when she thought about it a little more, she wasn’t sure how much she really t
rusted Uncle Toran. Not that he would lie to her–she didn’t think he would do that, didn’t think he could look her in the eye and outright tell her something he believed to be untrue. But it was the belief part that got her these days.
He would never be able to look at the house he lived in and see that it had been built on the backs of the children in the mines and paid for by the families who had lost loved ones in firing pin accidents and to cancers from the contaminated water near the mill. And even if she pressed the issue, produced evidence, he wouldn’t believe it.
He was closed. And he was comfortable that way. Unlike her father, he still had his wife and his life. When he surveyed his holdings, all of it was as he wanted it to be. And because of that, she would have to disconnect herself from his work as well as from Light & Geryon.
When she’d come here, she’d harbored small hopes that he would be outraged by the things Light & Geryon had helped happen in the name of money–but he wasn’t. He was sad about losing his friend and his business. He didn’t have the drive to do anything more than ask her to help him rebuild. But she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t make Light & Geryon into what it once was. She wouldn’t make a success out of little maneuvers that, in and of themselves, weren’t bad, but that had disastrous consequences. She couldn’t disengage herself from the end result like he did. She didn’t even want the name resurrected. Didn’t want anyone to think they would get the same thing they had previously gotten at Light & Geryon.
She was trying to figure out what to say to Uncle Toran. She wanted to tell him the truth about her father. But he would find it disrespectful. Her father was dead. He wasn’t causing damage now. Not that he’d caused it in the past; he’d simply done what so many do, which was to let things slide past him and be unconcerned by what he allowed. And his company was defunct. So that was at an end, too.
But even though she wanted Uncle Toran to know the truth, she wasn’t sure what it would accomplish now. By the same token, she found she wasn’t able to say anything about the company or its work that wasn’t true. She couldn’t tell the white lie and let him believe that she believed it was all okay.
She was trying to figure out how to say what she needed to when he started the conversation she had been waiting for.
“What do you plan to do now that you’re out of investing?”
Katharine sucked in a breath. Here she went. “I’m not out of investing. I’m opening my own firm.”
He leaned sharply forward at that. “What? You won’t work with Light & Geryon, but you’re going to go into direct competition with us?”
“Uncle Toran, Light & Geryon doesn’t exist right now, unless you reopen it. There’s no building and we have no idea where half the employees are.”
“The money is still there. It’s still invested.” He clasped his hands together and leaned back again, smug. It seemed it was always about the money.
“But without the people to manage it, what could you do?”
He deflated. “I’m not sure I have it in me to rebuild by myself. I find it entirely distasteful, though, that you seem bent on going into direct competition with your father’s firm.”
“It’s not direct competition. It’s quite different.” She shook off the idea that he would call her actions “distasteful” after all that he had done as part of the firm for all those years. Then she leaned forward, wanting and needing him to tell her that she was right, that she was doing something solid and good. She knew she likely wouldn’t hear that praise, even if it was just about striking out on her own. She told him anyway. “We’ll vet our investments through all stages, and only invest in things that improve the quality of life somewhere.”
He waited but didn’t say anything, didn’t offer the pat on the back that she still wanted even if she didn’t expect it..
“I don’t see how we could possibly be considered ‘in competition.’ We’ll be getting a different kind of return on the investment. We won’t likely generate the same kind of monetary returns that Light & Geryon was getting.”
“Then what’s the point?”
And that was exactly the point. Sadly, he didn’t see it at all. What she wanted was so far outside of the scope of what he could imagine, what he believed, that he couldn’t even comprehend it. Moreover, he thought she was crazy or stupid–or worse. But she knew.
She let the conversation turn to other, trivial matters and later, when she was ready to leave, hugged him, and told him to be well. Asked him to keep her up to date on what happened with Light & Geryon. It seemed he agreed to that only because legally, she was heir to her father’s half of the company. He remained deeply disappointed by what he saw as her defection from the family business, but Katharine stood her ground.
Though he only made halfhearted statements about attempting to reopen Light & Geryon, Katharine remained greatly concerned about that. She couldn’t be party to it continuing on the way it had. But she steeled herself to wait for his decision, and she breathed a sigh of relief a week later when she picked up the phone to hear him say he had decided to dismantle the company.
It was a good thing she’d been in her condo and by herself, or he would have seen her trip over her own furniture when he told her that her share of the sale of the investments would probably be in the tens of millions.
Katharine sat on the floor open-mouthed for about an hour after that.
And slowly, while she sat there, unmoving, she realized how she could use that money to do what she had been planning. She thought and figured and counted in her head. Then, several hours later, she dashed down to her car.
• • •
“Margot!” Katharine nearly ran up to the reference desk at the newly re-shelved and reopened Santa Monica Library.
Her heart was beating faster and her eyes were wet. She’d opened the windows on her car and let the air blow in as she’d raced over as fast as traffic would let her. She was excited.
The world was opening up. And despite the deep ache she was beginning to think she would always carry, she wanted something.
“Katharine.” Margot looked at her askance, then went back to helping the man at the desk who was puzzled and in need of help with some huge book.
When Margot finally turned back to her, Katharine was breathless. Patience was not her strong suit today.
“Margot. I need you.” She felt it in her cheeks and her eyes and it wove throughout her limbs. “Come with me. Let me explain… . Um, take lunch or a mental health break. Please?”
With a stray nod, Margot got someone over to cover the desk and took her lunch hour.
Katharine managed to hold her excitement in until they were sitting on the beach in the patch of clean sand she had come to think of as their spot. The wind and water were calm today, as though they too were waiting to hear what she would say.
“My Uncle Toran is dismantling Light & Geryon. Do you know what the company was worth?”
Margot shook her head and then dropped her mouth open as Katharine told her. But Katharine didn’t stop. “Half of that is mine. In my bank account, inside of a month after all the legalities get taken care of.”
“Wow. What are you going to do?”
“Well, I had decided that I had enough money to start a very small fund of my own. I would get others to invest with me. A little here, a little there, until we were big enough to go public.”
“You want to go back to that kind of investing?”
Her hands flew, trying to fill things in faster than she could talk. “That’s just it. I know investing. I know it head to tail. I want to invest in things that need it. Green companies, small business funds in underdeveloped countries, sound mining practices. Who knows? The return will be smaller in number of dollars, but bigger in other ways.” Margot nodded. “That makes more sense.”
“But with this infusion, I can start a corporation now. I have enough to do more than just invest my own trust money. I can hire a few people, start a real fund right off. It still won�
��t be huge, but it’s enough to go public.”
Margot broke out in a huge smile and threw her arms around Katharine. “I’m so happy for you. This is great news–”
“No,” Katharine pushed back. “Maybe you can be happy for us. I need a researcher. Someone I trust, someone who can find anything–follow the business trails through to the products and the ramifications. I know where to find people who can count the money, but I need you to make this work right.”
Margot stilled as the idea hit her.
“Don’t say anything yet.” Katharine held up her hand. “I don’t want you to be an employee. I want you to be my business partner. I’ll invest the money, but the business will belong to both of us. You probably need to think about it.”
“Wait. What?” Margot’s eyes glazed over.
Katharine waited a few moments. Though she just wanted her friend to say yes, she knew better. But it didn’t last long. “I don’t want you to be my employee. You’re my friend. And honestly I’m scared of running the whole thing by myself. I know how to run this whole business. But I need another logical brain to help out. Fresh eyes. Good ideas. I don’t think I should be the sole decision-maker. I don’t know that any one person should be.”
She watched as Margot started to think. And sure enough, about five seconds later, well-thought-out questions began coming one after the other.
“Are you sure you can put only your money into this and have me as a partner? Maybe I should just have a small percent. Even that would be huge for me.”
Katharine smiled. Margot was working out details. That probably meant she’d eventually agree.
“Yes, I’m sure. And no, you’re in fifty-fifty. Not even forty-nine–fifty-one.”
“I don’t have any money of my own to invest. It doesn’t seem right.”
For a moment, Katharine was somber. “I don’t really have the money either. I know how Light & Geryon earned that money. I thought long and hard about just giving it all to the United Way or the Red Cross or something like that. I don’t want it. Even the money in my account is the same thing. It’s not quite blood money, but it’s close. I can’t keep it for me. I wouldn’t feel right living off it. But I do like the idea that it could do something good. Something important starts with it. Something that you’ll help me make into something bigger than the damage that started it.”
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