The Hamptons is for entertaining and being seen. This is for living, doing business, and not being seen.
It is somehow colder here than in the city, and it is a long drive, so I'm glad I went back to the office and the parking garage to pick up my car.
This house is one of the places I can stay in if I want when Dad isn't here.
I never do.
Got keys, though. I know all the fucking alarm codes.
I had the best put them in.
I set my keys on the large kitchen island and go looking for Dad.
He is on the porch, beyond the glass sliding doors, smoking a cigar. There is a glass next to him on the railing, and he looks older.
The light should soften his features, but it doesn't. It shows him for what he is.
Brutal and controlling, a man who will do whatever it takes.
He might be older, but he is not weak. No one could ever mistake him for that.
Perhaps that is one reason we don't gel.
We are both too stubborn. We are cut from the same cloth.
Except, I hope, I'm the better version. Though sometimes, I wonder.
Fuck, maybe the drive here made me melancholy.
I cross the great room and slide open the door. "You summoned me?"
He doesn't answer for a while, just puffs on the Cuban cigar as if he is all alone.
It is a flex that makes many underlings and would-be equals tremble and know their specific place in his food chain.
All it does is piss me the fuck off, so I mutter, "I will be in your study, drinking your booze, for exactly five minutes, and then I'm going home."
I don't go there immediately. Instead, I take the curved staircase to the second floor and go to Lyndall's room.
It is dark, empty.
Clearly, he has sent her off to boarding school again.
It makes me angry.
One of her bears is on the bed. Posters of pop stars and a rapper are on the wall, and some dude she would call a totaldreamboat, now that she is over her idiotic crush on Cade. I think the only thing that killed that was meeting Violet, whom she adores.
But the room is a child's room. Sure, she is a teen, but her innocence shines through.
And it crushes down on something inside me knowing Dad keeps sending her off to boarding school against her will.
I turn, and light from the hall catches on a reflective sticker on her violin case.
Rage bubbles up, and I pick it up, opening it.
It is the new one in the old one's case. "Good for you, kid."
She loves the old one more than the new one Dad got her.
