Page 12 of My Girl to Take

“No,” he says.

“Logan—”

“I came to see whether you were dying.” He says it flatly, without cruelty, which somehow makes it worse. “That’s what I came for. Not a chair, not a title, not a company. I’m not taking anything from you. I stopped taking things from you when I was eighteen.”

Garth closes his eyes. “Alright,” he says.

“I’ll come tomorrow,” Logan says and stands.

He’s gone inside a minute. I hear the front door, then the car, and then nothing.

My stepfather is looking at the ceiling, his hand lying open on the blanket. It takes me until now to understand that he wasn’t asking for a chief executive.

He was simply asking his son to stay longer.

“Garth.”

“Don’t,” he says quietly. “It was a bad idea. I’ve had a lot of them.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed and put my hand over his. I think about a folder with nine pages in it, and one word written at the bottom in his handwriting.

Continue.

I’m going to have to go and find him.

Again.

Chapter Three

Logan

The envelope has been in my jacket for two days.

I find him on the second floor with a stripped-out door frame and a chisel. He doesn’t stop working when I come up the stairs, which by now I recognize as a policy rather than rudeness.

“Wilder.”

“Blake.”

I hold it out. He looks at it long enough that I have time to feel ridiculous, standing in a hallway in a four-thousand-dollar suit holding a bank envelope like a man paying off a bookmaker.

“Rent’s paid,” he says.

“It isn’t rent.”

He sets the chisel down and takes it. Doesn’t open it. Turns it over once, feeling the thickness through the paper, and that’s the whole inspection.

“What’s it for?”

“Whatever the building needs.”

He looks at me properly then, and I get the sense of being read by someone who has done a lot of it in places where getting it wrong was expensive.

“You know what most people want when they hand me money,” he says.

“No.”

“Yeah, you do.”