“Didn’t save the polar bears and ice caps though.”
“Not yet. If I’d known my parents were going to revoke my trust fund, I would’ve done what Margot’s done and filtered money out of it into a separate fund with a good money manager so I could’ve kept on doing bigger good in the world without being so dependent on the family. Of course, she’s like you. Fully owns her own trust fund and got it early because she was so responsible.”
His smile has fully disappeared now. “I want to live a life where I feel like I’m rich because of who I’m with and the satisfaction I get from what I do. Not because I was born with a billion-dollar trust fund.”
“Being CEO wasn’t satisfying?”
He lifts his head and stares at me, and I see it again.
The way he looks so much older than his thirty-one years.
The random gray hairs. The bags under his eyes. The slump of his shoulders. Even his skin seems old and worn, though less than it was when we started this trip.
“Yeah. Zero sleep and massive stress and second-guessing myself becoming my primary occupation and constantly having my mother whining that I wouldn’t let her sell any of her stock to keep up appearances with her wardrobe and her parties and her cars was so bone-deep satisfying.”
I wince. This man isnotgoing back into that role. And that’s a shame for all of the nonprofits he funded. “At least you know you did a good job.”
“Kept the lights on and made the stock price go up,” he mutters. “Way to go, Oliver. Way to set your family up to make more money that they don’t need and definitely don’t deserve.”
I should’ve expected him to be this self-aware by now, but it still takes me by surprise. “You don’t think they deserve it?”
“It wasn’t only the wine scam, Daphne. My father almost ran the company into the ground, and it’s a sheer miracle that the right people were already on staff to steer me to do any better than he did. He’s a shitty businessman and a shitty CEO who’s never once looked himself in the mirror and askedwhy was I the one chosen to live an easy life with more money than god?”
I shift on the bed. “I used to think about that all of the time. I finally decided it was because the universe knew that once I had full access to my trust fund, I’d invest in the world’s animals andforests and oceans. Like, that was how I’d balance it. By using what I didn’t earn for the good of the entire world.”
His green-dotted hazel eyes study me, and for the first time in my life, I don’t feel judged by someone from back home about it.
Not that everyone was an asshole.
It’s more that I was incredibly single-minded about it at the expense of everything else.
Annoyingis what it was most often called.
But Oliver—warmth floods my chest as I realize it’s respect coming out of his expression.
Appreciation.
Validation glows inside of me.Someonegets it. Someone I’d expected to judge me, but instead, he gets it.
“The only time Margot and I ever had a fight, it was about trickle-down economics.” He waves a hand, like he’s saying,yes, yes, it’s boring, I’m boring, we’ve covered that. “She’d never stopped to consider that maybe it didn’t work the way our parents said it did. Thatwewere supposed to trickle it down—not other rich people, butus—and we didn’t, but we told ourselves we did.”
I unfortunately understand what he’s talking about because economics and business and tax breaks for the rich funding better paychecks for the poor was a regular topic of conversation at my dinner table growing up.
“Did you trickle it down when you were in charge?” I ask him.
“Of fucking course I did.” He smiles, but this isn’t a nice smile.
This is—oh my god.
It’s apettysmile.
I like his petty side.
“I cut my mother’s salary first to do it,” he tells me.
I stare at him for the briefest of moments before I crack up. “No.”
“She didn’t do any real work for the company. She didn’t need a salary. I cut my own too.”
