by B. E. Baker
He nods.
“You let it go. If you’re ready to let go of any grudges against my friend Trudy’s. . . friend, or whatever Paul is, then you can call me.”
Jim’s mouth drops open.
I stand up and walk away. I glance back over my shoulder. “Once you’re ready to forgive, then I’ll forgive you too.”
Jim doesn’t call me the next day. That’s okay. He probably needs time to decide.
He doesn’t call me for the next three weeks, either. Now I’m annoyed.
Trudy goes to work for him, and she tells me that he’s let the whole Paul thing go. I wonder whether he did it for me. I wonder when he might call, now that he’s decided. I relive the wedding and our kiss in several dreams, both awake and asleep.
I agonize over my outfit for Geo and Trig’s wedding when I hear he’s invited. I spend the entire weekend jumping every time I hear a deep voice, every time a tall man with a dark head of hair crosses my path. But finally Luke mentions that James Fulton had pressing business and had to cancel at the last minute.
That’s when I give up hope.
Because if Jim hasn’t called me by now, he never will.
4
James
Luke always picks up on the very last ring. “Hello?”
“Tell me about Paisley,” I say.
“You’re calling me, on my honeymoon, to ask about Paisley?” Luke groans. “We have the world’s neediest friends and family.”
“You’ve been on your honeymoon for four days. I waited a reasonable period. You can spare five minutes. If I wait any longer, she’ll think I’m a flake.”
Luke laughs. “I sent a lot of guys her way at the wedding, but it didn’t even occur to me that she might like you. Even so, I’m glad you hit it off. Paisley deserves some happiness. What do you want to know?”
“I’m not sure, honestly.”
“You’re not sure? You called me.”
“I know I did. On your honeymoon, and I’m sorry about that. I feel like I saw a lot of good things, but didn’t learn any basics at all.”
“Basics. Well, you already know that she’s cute, obviously, and funny. She’s very bright. She’s great with kids, including both of mine, who are a handful, and she loves Troy too. She’s a hoot at the birthday parties, and she’s the kind of friend who always comes to birthday parties, even though they’re for little kids and she doesn’t have any of her own.”
“What’s her job?” I ask.
“That’s the strange part, honestly. Mary says she’s practically a genius, but she has zero ambition.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, she graduated number one in her major in college, which was some hard science. Biology or microbiology I think, so not an easy major. But instead of going on to medical school or veterinary school like most of the graduates, she decided to look for a job immediately. That’s how she met Mary. She became Mary’s first assistant, presumably to earn some money while she studied for the MCAT. Except she never actually took it, and never left the position either. She did jump head first into this charity Mary runs—she’s the number one supporter of Sub-for-Santa.”
“She never took the MCAT or wanted a promotion?” I ask. “And Mary doesn’t know why?”
“With the MCAT, Mary says she always insisted that she changed her mind. She’s happy organizing things, and she likes the office, and she’s happy in her tiny apartment, and she doesn’t want anything else.”
I think about the fiery go-getter I met and something doesn’t compute. I love puzzles, and my fingers itch to complete this one. “So you think I should call her?”
“Did she give you her phone number?” Luke asks. “Because I’ve had four guys text me and ask for it, but Mary said Paisley has a strict rule. If the guy doesn’t ask her for it, she doesn’t want me to share it.”
I smile. “Oh I asked for it myself. I don’t need you to give it to me.”
“Well, then yes. I’d suggest you call her, but make sure you’re actually interested. Mary will kill me if you jerk her around.”
“Alright, well thanks, and I hope the rest of your trip is a lot of fun.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way.” Luke laughs. “But don’t call me again before next week.” He hangs up.
My finger hovers over my contact list, and I tap it until Paisley’s name comes up. I’ve decided to leave Paul alone. I probably would have made the same decision either way, but with Trudy coming to work for me and Luke aware of what I’ve already done, it was the right call whether I wanted to call Paisley or not. It wasn’t even really Paul’s fault that he was raised right. I should never have had those answers at all.
I think about the kiss we shared again. Paisley took me completely by surprise, and I worried I might go into cardiac arrest. I’ve never thought about a kiss half as much as I’ve thought about that one. Her lips, her eyes, the way she tilted her head. Heaven help me.
I want to call her so badly that I should delete her number. Obviously there’s something wrong with me.
Bewitched.
That’s how I feel when I think about Luke’s wife’s friend.
When I close my eyes, I see her playing with those two little boys. Kind, patient, funny, mischievous, and she’s happy just helping her friends. She doesn’t expect anything from them. And obviously she doesn’t feel the burning ambition that I do, or she’d never be happy as an assistant.
I’m a plague. Spending time with me would only drag her down.
I was kidding when I called her a saint, but only partially, especially in comparison to myself. My fingers hover over the call button, but after a moment, I shut my phone off. I can’t call her. I’ve systematically repaid every single person who ever wronged me, from my first business partner who tried to cheat me out of my options, to Trig, to a dozen others including Paul. I always repay people who hurt me. I’ve never regretted it, not for a second. They all deserved it.
But when I told Paisley what I had done, for the first time in my life, I regretted my actions.
In that moment, I longed to be a good person, the kind of person who would impress her, the kind of man who would make her smile. Even now, I want to be the kind of person who could call her and bring happiness into her life, like Luke said. Clearly she deserves that, but I’m not that person. Deep down, underneath all the surface stuff, underneath the polish, and the money, and the fancy suits, I’m still bad news. If I call Paisley, her life will be worse, not better. Normally I’d be okay with that, but I don’t want that for her. If I spend more time with her, I’ll regret how I handle things, maybe forever. And if I learned anything from visiting my grandfather, it’s that I don’t need any more regret in my life.
I shove my phone into my pocket and leave my office. “Cooper,” I say. “Let’s go over those prospects you mentioned.”
Because if I’m not calling Paisley, I need something else to distract me.
“Great boss, I’ve got them right here.” Cooper waves a stack of papers at me and stands to head for the conference room.
I shake my head. “Your office is fine.” I sit in the chair across from his desk and hold out my hand for the analyses.
He hands them to me. “I mentioned a few of those before.” He keeps talking, running through the companies one-by-one, but I stop listening, my eyes scanning the data. Three dozen companies we’ve acquired in the past few months, all with plans in place to wreck them and sell off the parts.
“These are our best options?” I glance at Cooper.
He nods. “I know some of those look—”
“They’re terrible,” I say. “I mean, we need to chop these.” I glance down again. “Look at number six. A telecommunications manufacturer?” I shake my head. “This is a dinosaur. I’m not even sure why I approved purchasing it.”
“The factory is in excellent shape,” he says. “And the workers are well-educated, extremely well-trained, and motivated.”
“How have t
hey remained in business this long?” I ask. “They should have died years ago.”
“That’s one of the things that drew my attention,” he says. “You said you wanted to visit each of these, get a feel for the people and the place and take a closer look at their books.”
“Put this one at the bottom of that list,” I say. “Or maybe chop it entirely.”
“I think that’s a mistake,” Cooper says, “if you really want to grow some things. This one has contracts still, miraculously, and it’s got the support of the local government.”
“Fine, but I don’t have to like it.” I groan. “This whole project is going to ruin my life.”
“At first I was shocked when you said you wanted to try and turn some of these into something with growth potential,” Cooper says. “But this is what they taught me in business school, and it was a little bit fun. Like digging for diamonds with my dad as a kid. There’s hope here, and a little excitement too. Look, we can still move ahead on the chop for this entire stack, but I delayed the ones with some hope of revival, and now I’m kind of rooting for them.”
I close my eyes. I don’t cultivate. I don’t grow. I tear things down. My grandfather knows it, and I wonder for a moment whether this is some kind of cosmic joke. Like forcing an elephant to crawl through a tiny tunnel, or asking an eagle to swim across a lake.
I don’t do this sort of thing for a reason. It’s not who I am.
But there’s one person on earth who screwed me over and over, and I’ve never repaid him. He tore me away from Gigi every summer when he decided I was growing too attached. He gave me stock portfolios to manage at the age of ten, and beat me when they failed to perform. He ignored me, and expected me to be just like him at the same time. My father was the first name on my list, and he’s the last. Beating him at his own game and depriving him of grandfather’s trust may be my only hope of ever repaying his tender ministrations, and I can’t give up on that dream, not quite yet. “Alright, let’s focus. Run through these again.”
My head starts to pound as Cooper walks me through the pitiful companies I picked up for a song. His ideas to turn these companies around are laughable, because his excitement notwithstanding, Cooper’s a butcher, not a farmer.
I may need to hire some new talent. I start to scroll through ideas for possible contacts I could pursue to bring in some experts on growth strategies when I realize Cooper is talking dates.
“Which ones should I set up first?” Cooper asks. “You have two days next week we could open up, and another two the following week.”
I point at the top two on his list. “These look the most promising,” I say. “No reason to bother overhauling these others unless we can’t make the more likely ones work.”
“Don’t take this as complaining, but I’m not sure I understand exactly why we’re doing this at all,” Cooper says. “I mean, our original plans were good, and as exciting as the idea of rehabbing these is, we don’t exactly have the infrastructure in place for it.”
I’m not about to tell Cooper I need to steal three billion and change from my dad. “Infrastructure is something we can create. I’ll give you a budget and we can look for a few management teams to put in place. But my reasons are my own, which is why I’m the boss,” I say. “Send me the best resumes for your friends, and tell them our firm is growing its long term strategies.”
Cooper shrugs. “Alright, will do.”
Once I reach his door, I pivot. “Set up that European one as a last resort. I can’t stand all the snobs over there, and travel that direction is miserably long.”
“Yes sir.” Cooper looks a little glum about that. Well, too bad for him.
I’m going to cross Dad’s name off my list, but I’m not going to work myself into a frenzy to do it. Slow and steady, that’s the key. And if I feel a twinge of guilt at the prospect, wondering how Paisley would react, well, I shouldn’t. I’m not calling her, so it doesn’t matter.
“Once we’re done evaluating these, tell Anderson to bring me the list of companies we were investigating to purchase that might favor a growth strategy.”
Cooper grumbles and mumbles about my methods and my velocity, but he does what I tell him to do. At the end of the day, that’s what matters: results.
5
Paisley
I haven’t been home in eight years. I’m prepared for the media frenzy. I hate the paparazzi, but I expect them. I also brace myself for a dozen family members at the tiny airport closest to Vaduz.
I’m not prepared to walk off the gate at the St. Gallen Alternhein airport in Switzerland and see. . . no one. I blink several times and take it as a win. I pull the huge floppy hat off my head and tuck it under my arm. My sunglasses go into my bag, and I follow the signs around the corner to baggage claim.
My ten year old bag has a wonky wheel. I’m fighting to get it to roll straight when I hear his voice.
“Hey sis,” Cole says in German. “It took you four months to actually get here, but what’s that compared to a decade?”
I turn and smile. “I had to wait until things heated up. You do realize that August in Liechtenstein is like the fall in Atlanta?”
Cole shakes his head. “You missed it. You can admit it.”
I have missed it, just not enough to counteract the reasons I left. I glance around at the mostly empty airport. “How did you keep everyone away?”
He shrugs. “You booked under Paisley, I assume, which probably threw the media. They know you as Holly, and frankly, they’ve probably given up on you at this point. I mean, I practically gave up too, and I knew you were coming.”
“Oh, stop.”
“I’m not even kidding. Mom and Dad don’t know. I figured it was safer that way.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m not scared of the media.”
“Oh I didn’t mean it was safer for you.” Cole shakes his head and picks up my bag. “I meant it would be safer for Mom and Dad. They’ve been disappointed too many times.”
That one stings, but it’s fair. I’ve canceled more than my share of trips home with fabricated excuses. The first Christmas was rough, I’ll admit, and I felt pretty guilty when I canceled. But then I started helping Mary with Sub-for-Santa, and the longer I went without visiting, the easier it got to put off my return.
I follow Cole to his car. I forgot how laid back airports here are compared to American ones. “Thanks for picking me up,” I say.
“Mom and Dad are going to flip.”
“I hope they flip in a good way.”
Cole’s eyes soften. “Of course they will. They miss you. We all do.”
“Not everyone,” I say.
Cole doesn’t say anything for a while.
“I was sort of hoping you’d bring some handsome American home with you,” Cole finally says, still in German. I’m actually surprised how easily I slip back in to my native tongue after eight years of nothing but English. “Preferably a rich one.”
I think of Jim, who is both handsome and rich, and I could kick myself. It has been months. I’m so pathetic. My hand caresses the smooth leather of the seat in Cole’s shiny black SUV. “Are things that bad?”
Cole shrugs. “Do you care?”
I close my eyes. “Of course I care.” I lean my head against the cold glass and watch the scenery pass. It looks exactly as I remembered it, and also nothing at all like I recall. The building styles are the same, of course. Nothing in Switzerland ever changes there. But there are new buildings, too, some big ones even.
“Looks like commerce is coming along,” I say.
“Does it?” Cole frowns. “Maybe for the Swiss. Not so much at home.”
“I thought Mom and Dad were doing fine,” I say. “Last I checked, everyone said things were good.”
Cole sighs. “For the family or the trust?”
“Both? Either?”
“The family is fine, but the trust is struggling. And even our family investments have shifted. Ever since they eliminated the tax sh
elters, things have been hard.”
“Mom and Dad didn’t know about the money laundering,” I say, my defense automatic.
“They didn’t,” Cole agrees. “But they benefitted from it all the same. And now, with business declining.” He inhales and exhales. “Things are rough. So a rich, enterprising American would be welcomed, not for a bankroll so much as for a trusted opinion.”
“Mom’s not selling her jewelry yet?” I ask.
“It’s hard to move old stuff these days,” he says. “Surprisingly, very few people want old, raw cut, or unpolished gems.”
“But they’re selling art?”
Cole grips the steering wheel. “A painting or two, maybe, but mostly we’re figuring things out. They’re renting out the Viennese palaces as wedding venues to offset the costs. It’s actually working better than we expected.”
“That sounds promising.”
“I’m just glad you’re here. It’ll be nice to have some input and suggestions, not to be coming up with all the solutions alone.”
I put off my return home and agonized over this reunion, but when Cole and I turn the corner and Vaduz castle comes into view, my heart lurches.
It has been a long time, but it’s still home.
The short, curved stone tower and the large square one behind it, topped with a reddish tile roof, are where I spent almost my entire childhood. I’ve seen hundreds upon hundreds of people stopping their cars on this bend, taking photos with my home behind them. I told myself I didn’t care that it has been so long. I actually believed it.
But I’ve missed it.
I can’t lie to myself, not here. And I miss him too, so much worse right here where every memory is filled with him. The feeling strikes me like a blow and my eyes fill with tears.
Cole takes my hand. “I know.”
“I’ve been a coward.” My nose begins to run. My eyes overflow and tears stream down my cheeks. “But it hurts, Cole. It hurts too much.”