The new securityteam that we’ve hired is a fucking masterpiece.
They don’t buzz me through our system when it’s a benign delivery or a neighbor with a casserole. They only buzz when there’s a legitimate threat I need to address.
“Mr. Masterson,” the guard says over the speaker, trying to sound like this is normal. “Apologies for disturbing you, but we have your father at the outer gate. He’s insisting that he be granted entrance, but he’s not on our list.”
I’m at the deck above the marsh, a cup of coffee I won’t drink cooling in my hand while I spend a few moments watching a heron write the letter S across the water. The call from security draws a line tight under my ribs.
“Deny,” I say.
We denied a senator last week who wanted to earn a favor after hearing rumblings of us calling around. We denied a guest with delusions of significance who thinks his yacht is a key to animaginary problem. We deny my father the way we deny anyone and everyone else who doesn’t fucking matter.
Because he doesn’t matter right now.
The second buzz comes thirty seconds later. “He’s on the intercom for you, sir.”
Of course he is.
I press the phone to my ear and don’t bother with hello.
“You’ve developed a talent for unnecessary embarrassment,” my father says. No static. He’s close enough the gate camera could count threads in his tie. “Open the gate, Conrad.”
“You’re not on my list.”
“I’m your father. I don’t need to be on a list.”
“You’re not on my list,” I repeat, and take a swallow of coffee I still don’t want, just to have something to do with my hand.
He exhales—one of his practiced releases, the kind he uses on associates and wives and dogs. “You have ten seconds to stop performing and start behaving like a man who understands the size of what he’s up against.”
“If you’re counting, be sure to start at one.”
The line goes dead. He calls my cell three seconds later, because control is a religion with him. Too bad I’ve become an atheist. I’ll never worship at his altar again.
I can’t even identify when, exactly, it was that the switch flipped for me. When I stopped wanting to please him. Was it when he and the other sperm donors invented that absurd ‘test’guaranteed to put us on our asses and snatch our inheritance away?
Or is this simply the culmination of a lifetime of belittling, neglectful, and dismissive parenting?
“You’re angry,” he says, skipping the early liturgy.
“No,” I say, watching the heron. “I’m busy.”
“You’re also hemorrhaging cash on a vanity project for a piece of ass. Private security at this scale? A medical team? You took the company plane off the grid. You took the board calendar off my desk.”
“We needed the plane. And we’re not hemorrhaging cash. The casino is profitable, and we’ve got investments you’d never dream about, old man.”
He ignores me. “You will open this gate. We will have a conversation about limits. And then we will make a plan to stop lighting my money on fire.”
It’s nothismoney, and it never was, but he likes the sound of the pronoun more than he loves the truth. It’s a Masterson flaw. We try to own what we can’t.
Mock-acquiescence plays better with him than refusal. He taught me that. Yield a step, cut the knees later.
“Fine,” I say, bored. “Come on in. If you get lost, follow the scent of competence because that’s where we’re at.”
I hang up before he can do the father-voice that sets my teeth on edge. Below, the gate rolls back, the long drive yielding a black car.
Inside, in the den we turned into a war room, Atticus looks up from his screens and reads my face like a printout.
“Guest?” he says.
