You know her.
I didn’t trust her when trust was the only thing she asked of me. I let her down when she needed me most. I won’t make that mistake again. No matter the circumstances, I will trust her.
My phone rings. Dad.
I answer with a groan, and he doesn’t even bother with hello.
“Did you see the news just now?” he barks.
“Yes,” I say. “I saw it.”
“Now do you see what I was talking about?”
“I see she’s inheriting her family’s business on her twenty-eighth birthday,” I reply. “Isn’t that pretty much the standard for something of that magnitude? Her father wouldn’t hand it over to an eighteen-year-old to run.”
“I guess so,” he mutters, and some of his bravado slips.
“But what I don’t see,” I press, and I know my tone sounds accusatory and disrespectful, “is where she’s done anything to me, Dad. Something else you know that I don’t?”
A pause. Then, smaller: “Son, it’s complicated.”
I sit up, the hair on my arms lifting. “What. Is. Complicated?”
Before he can answer, I hear Mom’s voice on the line. “Luke, maybe you should come over so we can talk.”
I don’t rememberthe drive to my parents’ house. One minute I’m in my truck, the next I’m shoving through the front door.
“Mom! Dad! Where are you?”
Mom meets me in the hallway. Her eyes are red and swollen, like she’s already been crying for hours. She doesn’t speak. She just nods toward the backyard.
Dad is sitting at the patio table. The one Andi bought them. He’s staring into a coffee cup like it holds absolution.
“What the hell is going on, Dad?” I demand. I don’t sit. I don’t soften it.
He exhales slowly, still not looking at me.
“Andi’s father, Maxwell, and I were business partners once. We had a development agreement. He bought a key parcel of land just before he died. He put up all the money to help me out. My name wasn’t on the deed.”
I say nothing. He continues.
“When he died, the property went into probate. I couldn’t touch it. I’ve been bleeding money for years because of it. We own everything around it, but without that one parcel, the whole development stalled.”
His fingers tighten around the mug. “I realized who Andi was when she told us about her parents. About foster care.”
The silence stretches.
“So I hired a private investigator.”
There it is.
“He found the court records. The mental hospital commitment. Then he went further. He got the photographs.”
My pulse starts pounding in my ears.
“When you walked in that night,” Dad says quietly, “I had just told Andi that if she didn’t give me the property, I would leak those pictures to the press and make sure the board blocked her from taking control of her company.”
For a moment, I honestly can’t breathe.
