Page 62 of Beyond the Hedge Maze

Jesse scrolled through years’ worth of messages. They ranged from rude, to aggressive, to downright hostile.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Oliver swallowed. “I was embarrassed, I guess. But I figured you needed to know now. I hope you and Charlotte had some success with the furniture, because I’m going to have to pay a retainer, I suppose. I don’t know how I’m going to fucking afford it.”

Over the past few days, Jesse had definitively learned that there was no money; that Oliver had no safety net. And hearing this? It was time. He couldn’t put it off any longer.

Jesse took Oliver’s hand, hoping it would soften the blow. “Charlotte wasn’t here to help with furniture appraisal. I asked her here so she could help me put together an alternative plan for the estate.”

Oliver slowly pulled his hands away, a skeptical tone in his voice. “I don’t understand. Why did you lie? You said you had found buyers for those books, and the lamp. I’m sure there’s other stuff sitting around upstairs.”

“No, Oliver, there’s not.”

Oliver’s voice started to rise. “What do you mean? There’s all sorts of rubbish, all over the house. There’s no way you’ve looked through it all.”

Jesse suddenly realized that he had been too gentle with Oliver. He had spent two months making lists of everything Oliver owned, researching constantly, trying to find anything at all that he might sell. Oliver needed to know that it had mostly been a waste of time. That it had been a futile exercise.

“Please listen to me.” Jesse took out his phone. It would have been better to show this to Oliver on a computer screen, but it didn’t matter. He handed him the proposal that he and Charlotte had been working on.

“What is this?” Oliver’s eyes rapidly scanned the small screen, and Jesse could only hope that he was actually comprehending what he was reading.

“It’s a five-year plan for the estate. Actually, it’s several five-year plans for the estate, depending on what avenue you think you’d like to pursue. Really, I think it needs to be a combination of several things.” Oliver’s face had hardened, his expression completely closed off. And instead of letting him sit and digest, Jesse kept talking. He worried what would happen if he stopped. “It doesn’t solve our immediate roofing problem, but this is what we think is the best path moving forward.”

Oliver tossed the phone on the blanket between them. “My roofing problem.”

“What?”

“You said our immediate roofing problem. It’s my problem.”

“Oliver…”

“No, Jesse, it is. It’s my fucking problem. This isn’t your home. You don’t live here. This isn’t your legacy.” Oliver’s voice rose with each punctuated sentence.

“Cariño, just hear me out, please. You can’t keep selling bits and pieces of the estate, it won’t be enough money. That’s not a solution. But I have one.” Jesse pulled open the proposal again on his phone, but Oliver was clearly not interested.

“Don’t call me that. You’re not going to distract me.”

“I’m not trying—”

“No. I didn’t ask you to do this. I didn’t hire you for this. You know how I feel about those other estates, how they let strangers in and out every day. I don’t want that.”

“I understand, Oliver, but—”

“But what? I know you didn’t account for everything. You didn’t even finish the job I hired you to do.”

“I promise I did, cariño. I went through everyth—”

“STOP. Stop. You didn’t. There’s hundreds of portraits and paintings hanging on every fucking wall of the house, and you didn’t look at ONE. You said at the very beginning you were going to ask me questions, and you didn’t. I was with you all the time, and you never looked at one single piece of art. Some of that is valuable, I know that for a fact. You didn’t try hard enough.”

Angry tears were streaming down Oliver’s face, and Jesse wanted to collapse inside himself. Retreat into an unknown eternal darkness.

And Oliver was right. He hadn’t done any appraisals on the art in the house. He wouldn’t.

Oliver ripped the phone back out of his hand, scrolling until he got to a page that Jesse really hadn’t wanted to explain. He turned it around and nearly shoved it back in Jesse’s face. It was a budgeted breakdown of the current monthly expenses of the estate. It also included a list of all of the large, one-off maintenance expenses Oliver had incurred over the last two years.

“How do you even have these numbers? Have you been in my study?”

Charlotte had when he was busy comforting Oliver, but that fact didn’t seem important. He was equally as responsible. “Yes.”