“It is in my family.” I met his eyes. “Do you know what my father’s going to say when I tell him I can’t go through with this deal? He’s going to say I’m weak. That I let a pretty girl cloud my judgment. That I’m not worthy of the Bancroft name.”
“And what are you going to say back?”
I stared down at my untouched burger. “Nothing. Because he’ll be right. I did let Sylvie cloud my judgment. I let myself feel things I had no business feeling, and now I can’t do what needs to be done.”
“What needs to be done?” Phineas’s voice was sharp. “Destroying a family’s legacy for oil money? That’s what needs to be done?”
“From a business perspective? Yes.” The words tasted like ash in my mouth. “The oil is there. The land is valuable. The Northwoods are going to lose everything anyway. At least this way they get paid for it.”
“And you believe that bullshit?”
I was quiet for a long time, picking at my fries while the diner hummed around us. A few other customers sat scattered around the restaurant, but no one paid us any attention. Just two men having a late lunch, nothing remarkable about that.
“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” I finally admitted. “I came here thinking I was doing a job. Simple acquisition, clean and straightforward. But then I met her, and everything got complicated.”
“Love usually does that.”
“I didn’t say anything about love.”
Phineas snorted. “You didn’t have to. It’s written all over your miserable face.”
I took another drink of coffee, letting the bitter warmth anchor me. “Even if I am in love with her—which I’m not saying I am—it doesn’t matter. She hates me now. She’ll never forgive me for lying to her.”
“Maybe not. But that’s not really the point, is it?”
“What is the point then?”
“The point is who you want to be. Do you want to be the kind of man who destroys things for money, or do you want to be the kind who tries to build something better?”
I pushed the burger away, my stomach churning. “Easy for you to say. You don’t have a family legacy breathing down your neck. You don’t have billions of dollars in expectations weighing on every decision you make.”
“No,” Phineas said quietly. “I just have a lifetime of regrets about all the times I chose the easy path instead of the right one. Trust me, that’s a heavier weight to carry.”
We finished the meal in relative silence. Phineas paid the check over my protests, and we walked back out into the cold December air. The sun was starting to set, which only reminded me painfully of the sunset I’d watched with Sylvie just the night before.
“Go home, Kent,” Phineas said when we reached the corner where our paths diverged. “Sleep this off. And when you wake up tomorrow, decide who you really are.”
“What if I don’t like the answer?”
“Then at least you’ll know the truth.”
I watched him walk away. Then I turned and walked in the opposite direction, my feet carrying me toward the neon sign of another bar I’d spotted earlier.
The smart thing would have been to go back to the lodge, pack my things, and drive back to New York. Face my father’s disappointment and figure out how to move on with my life. But I wasn’t feeling particularly smart. And driving anywhere wasn’t an option. I didn’t want to go back to the lodge just yet. I was a chickenshit and had every intention of sneaking in when everyone else was asleep.
That meant I had some time to kill.
The second bar was even seedier than the first, a place called Murphy’s that looked like it was straight out of the nineteenth century. The bartender was a grizzled man in his fifties who looked like he’d seen everything and had been unimpressed by most of it.
“What’ll it be?” he asked when I slumped onto a stool.
“Whiskey. Make it a double.”
He poured without comment. I drank without tasting. The alcohol wasn’t helping anymore. It was just making everything feel more distant and surreal, like I was watching someone else’s life fall apart instead of living it myself.
My phone buzzed with a text from my father.What’s the news?
I stared at the message for a long time, my thumb hovering over the keyboard. Fuck him. He just helped ruin my life. I didn’t feel like talking to him.
