by Alex Wolf
The moment I think about how little time I have left with my mother, and all the time I squandered that I could’ve spent with her, tears stream down my cheeks. I always thought I’d go out and conquer everything I wanted, and then we’d have years to make up for it. My hand comes to my mouth as it all crashes into me when I think about the fact she’ll be gone in a matter of months, maybe less.
I try not to have a breakdown in front of my father, but it all hits me at once, the finality sets in. The hardest thing is, I can’t take any of it out on him, even though I want to. I made a promise. I hate the world right now, and I have to be nice to him, or at least pretend to be.
What makes things even worse is I want to let him back in so badly, the same way I want to tell Wells everything, let him be by my side too. All the memories from my childhood flood back every time I look at him.
He catches me from the corner of his eye, sets his plate down, and rushes over. He manages to stop himself before he puts an arm around me. It might be the way I glare right at him when he’s about to do it.
He sits down. Just sits there next to me but doesn’t say anything for a long few seconds. Finally, he just nods and says, “I know.”
“No, you don’t.” The words come out of nowhere.
He nods. “I may have been in prison, estranged from you and your mom.” He turns to face me. “But I still know. I still feel both of you with my heart, all the time. It didn’t just go away.”
I don’t want to open up to him, but who else can I talk to about this? I need to get it out, purge everything from my system, so I can be there for my mom. “You don’t understand. I haven’t been here for her. Not the way I should’ve been.”
He starts to reach for my forearm, then pulls his hand back. “Yeah, I do know.” His eyes roll up to the ceiling and he lets out a sigh. “And it’s my fault.”
“What?”
“Come on, Meadow. We both know you ended up like me, even when I prayed every night you’d be more like your mother. I knew it the second you were born, though. You can’t not work. You can’t not go after everything you want. But it’s my fault because I did what I did, and I went away. If I’d been here, you would’ve been here much more, spent more time with her. I soiled this house, this family. I shit all over this place and made it impossible for you to find comfort within these walls. I know you still came over, but not as much as you would have, and it’s my fault.”
“How do you know how often I came over here?”
He shakes his head at me. “I still talked to your mother all the time when I was inside.”
My blood starts to boil a little at the thought, but I have to push it all back down because my mother is dying of cancer. She told me she cut him off. She lied to me.
As if he can tell exactly what I’m thinking, which is something else I hate about him, he says, “She wanted to tell you. But c’mon.”
My brows narrow at him. “C’mon what?”
“You knew the whole time. You lied to yourself about it. I know how your brain works better than anyone. There’s no way in hell you thought she’d cut me off. So don’t get mad at her for lying about it when you lied to make yourself feel better. You did the same thing she did, theoretically.”
“Theoretically.” I mock him when I say it. He’s such a fucking asshole. A brilliant one, but still a dick. Finally, I nod. “Okay, maybe I did know. Maybe I should blame you. You should’ve cut yourself off after what you did.”
“Blame me if you want. I deserve it.”
I sneer. “Don’t do that. Don’t fucking play victim when Mom is dying in the other room. Jesus.”
“I’m not looking for pity. But, Meadow?”
“What?”
“I never stopped loving her. And I never stopped loving you.”
I shake my head at him. “Really? Why’d you do what you did then?”
“I could apologize a thousand times and it’d never be enough.”
“You’re goddamn right it wouldn’t.” I lower my voice, so Mom doesn’t hear, since I’m supposed to be playing nice. This needs aired out, though. Since he’s here. I sit up straight and point a finger at him. “We were perfect. We were the best family. I was so h-happy.” Goddamn it. So many emotions in this house. I don’t want to look weak in front of him. I don’t want him to know he still gets to me, but I’ve buried this pain for over a decade. “Why couldn’t you have just kept being a professor? Why couldn’t you just work at the college, then come home to us every night? Instead of starting that goddamn firm.”
“Do you want the truth?”
I nod. “Yeah, what the fuck else would I want?”
“A lie, because the truth might be difficult to hear.”
“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
He smiles the second I start saying the quote. “So, you do remember.”
I scoff. “I remember everything. A curse you gave me, according to you.”
“Thomas Sowell is a brilliant man.”
“I know, I heard all about him constantly, when I had a father.”
He winces at that. “Look, Meadow, I didn’t feel alive when I was teaching at the college. I did briefly. But when I started that firm, it was magic. It was going to provide financial security for you and your mother and our family for generations to come. I just… I just became consumed by it. Had to do anything to win, anything to get an edge, take on every risk I could, just to see if I could beat it.”
My hands ball into fists. “Why didn’t we make you feel alive? Me and Mom. That should’ve been enough for you.”
He shakes his head. “You did. It’s hard to describe. You and your mother always held my heart. Every damn square inch of it belonged to you two. My brain… You know how it is. You know how it just goes and goes and never shuts off, and you have to constantly feed it data, information, events, then stitch them all together just for a few minutes of relief, just to get that rush when you break the code. That’s what the firm did for me, something I couldn’t do reciting theories to students who just wanted a grade to satisfy some degree requirements. It was mindless, dull.”
I’ve never asked him what I’m about to. I never looked into it because I didn’t want to know. It’s a miracle I was able to distance myself from it to this day. It was in the papers when I was a teenager, but I avoided them like the plague. “What exactly did you do? To end up in prison?”
His eyes widen in surprise. “What?”
“I said what did you do?”
His eyes dart around, like maybe it’s a trick question. “I-I, uhh, I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know what you did. All I know is you were guilty and went to prison.”
“How is that possible?”
I fold my arms over my chest. “I didn’t want to know. But I do now.”
He eyes me for a while, then swallows. “I got inside information on a few different trades. I learned one company was about to be rewarded a huge government military contract through an old associate who didn’t realize I’d opened up a firm and spoke to me off the record. Another friend told me about a merger about to happen, a small tech company being bought up by a public one. Multiple arbitrage situations.”
“It’s not arbitrage if it’s illegal. Fuck.”
“The firm was young, and we needed capital. We needed a few big plays to really start moving major weight, to get respect on the Street. To bring in big clients. I was the only real name, and the other young partners were brilliant, but hadn’t proven themselves. We were going to get crushed in a year if we didn’t inflate our portfolios.”
“So, your partners, they in prison too? Or did they just make an example out of you?”
He shakes his head. “They didn’t know. I wanted to protect them in case there was blowback, but you have to remember, Meadow, this was before the mortgage collapse. This kind of thing happened all the time. Manhattan was t
rading on insider information daily. It was the only way we could compete.”
“Sounds like excuses to me. Sounds like you would’ve been happier hanging out at the house and day trading. Wouldn’t have lost your family.” I can’t believe he threw us all away, just to make money. “Why’d you end up in prison and not just pay fines? Isn’t that what they do to you assholes when you get caught? You have to defraud old ladies out of their pensions to go to prison, and even then, half of them get released early.”
“The DA was young and ambitious. Ran on a populist platform of ending corruption and coming down hard on billionaire investors, even though I wasn’t a billionaire. Not even close. I was a big name though, in the economics world. Advised presidents. DA wanted headlines, to make a name for himself, and he used mine to do it.”
I never saw any of that coming when I was younger. “I idolized you. You were my hero, even after you left the university. I had to watch men in jackets come into this fucking house, and perp walk you out the front door.” I point toward the living room and do my best to hold it together. “Right through there.” I point at the stairs. “While I hugged that post, watching it all.”
His eyes move down to the ground. “I know.”
“You were my best friend. I love Mom and she knows that, but I lost everything when I lost you. Do you know what it was like, at fourteen, to lose the only person in the world who could understand me? Who got me?”
A tear rolls down his cheek. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry is for being late to pick me up from school. You left me with nothing when I needed you the most. They took everything but the house. I had to set up some online businesses for extra passive income, just so Mom didn’t have to work three jobs. We had to start all over. And you’re sorry?”
The worst part of this whole thing is, I want to forgive him. So damn bad. If he only knew how many plane tickets I’ve purchased, telling myself I would go see him, then cancelled them at the last minute. The time I drove ten hours in the night planning to just hear his voice, then turned around and came back.
“I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, or to stop hating me. I want to be here with your mother, and to help take care of you, and it eats me up inside, because I know how bad you don’t want me around.”
I shake my head, tears rolling down my face. “That’s the thing, Dad. I do want you around. I want you around so bad. I always have. That’s what makes it so hard, because you deserve my hate, and it’s my brain making me treat you this way, because I stopped using my heart the day you went away.”
That’s not totally true, what I just told him. It was true, until recently. But it doesn’t matter—circumstances, once more, are preventing me from using my heart again.
He stands up awkwardly, like he doesn’t know if he should hug me or leave me alone. “Well, I really am sorry. And I’ll only be here for as long as your mom needs me. And then I’ll be out of your hair, okay?”
His cordial tone almost breaks me, as if this is just some kind of transaction. I know he’s trying to just keep the peace and do whatever makes things easier on me.
“I’ll do my best to make it easy on both of us too. Until, well, you know.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder. It seems like just an instinctive move, like something a father would do.
It feels so good. For that split-second, I actually feel safe, protected, understood when he does it.
“Thank you.”
Then, his hand is gone, and the emptiness fills me again.
Mom is sleeping and didn’t want to be disturbed. Dad is there, and I have no clue when I might get another chance to get caught up on some work, so I came into the office, but I’m literally ten minutes away and can rush home in an instant if I need to. I’ve been a machine the past hour.
Fifteen minutes to go over a list with my assistant, thirty minutes for Zoom meetings with several investors about the shelter project, and I’ve hammered out seven hundred words of a blog article in the last fifteen minutes.
This is the most normal I’ve felt in weeks.
I needed it, badly. A distraction, even if it’s for an hour.
I finish up, apologize profusely to my assistant for being so absent and difficult to reach. I haven’t told anyone what’s going on because my family matters are private—and I’m out the door, heading back to Mom’s before she wakes up.
It’s a beautiful day, and I think to myself how it really would have been a beautiful day, walking out of the office and into this weather three months ago. Now, I’m not sure any day will ever be beautiful again.
No matter how hard I try to forget, how hard I try to focus on Mom, everything that’s coming my way in the next month, I still can’t stop thinking about Wells Covington. I can still feel myself wrapped in his arms. He’s the opposite of what I should want, and yet I want more. Never in my life did I think a man would make me feel safe, like nothing could hurt me, but somehow, he pulled it off, even if it was brief.
I take the last step down the stoop and turn to head down the sidewalk.
“A rare sighting in public.”
I freeze. Just stop in my tracks. I don’t have to look. I know the voice, and I hate that the sound of him elicits that reaction from me.
It’s like pure comfort envelopes me, but I have to pretend to be upset. I have to push him away, and I don’t want to. It’s just necessary.
As I turn, and he comes into view, my fingers start to tremble. It’s not fear but pure excitement. Adrenaline floods my veins, shooting through my body at the sight of him. Why does he have to make this more difficult than it is?
Maybe you should tell him, so he understands.
Horrible idea. Maybe something vague, but I can’t let him in right now. If I let him comfort me, which I know he would do, it’ll just be another distraction. I saw how that worked out last time.
My eyes meet his, and my brows stitch themselves together. “I can’t do this right now.”
He’s wearing a suit, and I want to smile so badly at his ornery, boyish grin in that five-thousand-dollar outfit, but I can’t. It’s not fair to lead him on, give him some kind of hope.
“What are we doing?” He takes a step toward me.
My heartrate spikes, like it does for him and only him. “Look, I’m sorry for just ghosting you. It wasn’t fair.”
“Damn right it wasn’t. Social protocol would dictate I deserve some kind of explanation.”
Maybe I’ve misjudged him a little, too. He’s so calm and collected right now—mature. I thought he’d—I don’t know, react differently. Be angry, be forceful, something. A small part of me is a little upset he doesn’t seem to have a care in the world right now.
I know I owe him the explanation, and yet, all I want to do is make him go away so I don’t want to kiss him. “I’m serious, Wells. I can’t do this.”
I need to get back home. I do not want my mother to wake up without me there, the same way I wasn’t there when I should’ve been for the last several years. I won’t do that to her again.
I start to walk down the street, and his hand shoots out and catches me by the forearm.
My reaction is threefold. First surprise, then a jolt of electricity fires through my limbs at his strong fingers clutching me. It’s the anger that follows that wins out.
My gaze moves to his hand, then up to his eyes. I say through my teeth, “Let go of me.”
This time, he’s not cordial at all. All those things I was hoping for earlier, yeah, I misjudged him, apparently. He wasn’t calm. His feelings were boiling up, and he was doing everything he could to suppress them, but one thing is clear in his eyes right now. He will get an explanation.
His jaw clenches and his stare doesn’t stray from my face. “What happened?”
I yank my arm away from him. “Don’t fucking grab me like that again.”
I start to shoulder my way past him to get down the sidewalk, and he cuts me off, so my face is now inches away from his
broad chest. I’m trapped. He’s huge and there’s no way I can boulder through him.
“Get out of my goddamn way.”
He smirks down at me, like I’m some kind of pesky child, and it makes me want to punch his smug face. He makes a show of leaning down so his mouth is next to my ear. “Do I look like a man who will accept the shit you’re trying to do right now?”
Jesus, his tone. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so turned on and enraged at the same time. He’s seriously holding me hostage, being a big stupid ape Neanderthal fuckface, and it’s doing something for me. He’s never been like this before.
Before I can say anything, he whisper-growls, “I’m owed an explanation. Let’s have it.”
I can tell butting heads with him will get me absolutely nowhere, so I look him in the eye and give him the bare minimum. “I had a family emergency. And I’m still dealing with it, and will be dealing with it for the foreseeable future.”
“Family?” He scoffs.
Asshole!
The reaction I just received was not what I had expected. Why? My brain goes into overdrive. He scoffed at the word ‘family.’
Shit, he knows.
I don’t know how he knows, but he does. How much he has learned is the key variable. If he’d figured everything out, he would’ve said way more than that, and there’s no way he could. I’ve covered my tracks on every detail possible.
“It’s true.” I do my best to sell him on that alone. It won’t work, so I don’t know why I do it, but I do. Why can’t he be another dipshit who can be easily manipulated?
No, I bet he investigated me the first time he saw me. Got every piece of information possible.
“Okay, then.” He pushes a few strands of hair behind my ear, and I want to melt into him so damn badly.
I just can’t. This is not a time in my life to give in to what I want to do. I’ve done that enough already.
He plays with my hair, and I don’t stop him because it feels so damn good. “I’m sorry for whatever happened.”
Now, I just want to break down. Just so he’ll hold me for two seconds.