My phone buzzes again, a text lighting up the screen.
CORRINE: Deep breath. You’ve survived worse.
She nods at me from her seat at the table—subtle, supportive—like she’s been my entire life, even when I didn’t deserve it. None of that changed when she took the CFO position at the firm.
If anything, she’s been more of a rock than ever before.
I nod once. She catches it, and her eyes meet mine for a beat—calm and steady—before leaving me alone with my thoughts and the slow churn of anxiety rising in my chest.
This isn’t how the legacy was supposed to unfold.
Marchesi & Harrow was never just a firm. It was a dynasty.
Built by our fathers in the late eighties, it grew from a shared vision—sketched on bar napkins and blueprints—into the most respected architecture firm in Manhattan. Award-winning. Influential. A name that opened doors.
We were raised inside it.
Dante Marchesi and I were expected to inherit the empire.
The sons of visionaries.
The next generation.
When we were sixteen, everything shifted.
Dante’s parents sent him to the UK—a boarding school outside London, followed by Cambridge.
I stayed in New York, immersed in the bones and breath of this city. Interned early. Shadowed my father. I knew every corridor of this firm before I was old enough to legally sign a contract.
When Dante came back, it was like someone had dropped a lion into a room of well-mannered wolves.
The boy I’d once known—my childhood best friend—had grown into something sharp-edged and impossible to predict.
He returned with charm that could dismantle a room, an ego that didn’t ask for permission, and a disdain for authority that grated against everything I’d spent years learning to navigate.
But none of that mattered because the plan was already in motion.
We were hired straight out of college—two golden boys stepping into their fathers’ shoes. Equal partners.
On paper, it should have worked.
But it’s been chaos since day one.
Clashing visions. Competing egos. Personal history weaponized in every argument.
There’s a reason the board installed a clause when we took over. They saw the fault lines even before we did.
Five years. That was the deal.
Five years of shared leadership. Of oversight.
Until then, the company’s controlling shares—one-third me, one-third Dante, and one-third the board—would hold each of us in check.
At the end of that term, the final controlling shares—held in escrow since the transition—would be released to us jointly.
We’d be untouchable.
And we almost fucking made it.
