Page 89 of Freefall

I don’t know how long we stay like that.

Long enough for the tea to grow cold. For the panic in my chest to loosen its grip a little. Long enough that when the quiet is finally broken by the sound of a car door outside, I realize that I almost started to believe that nothing could touch us here.

23

NATE

The picture frames behind my father’s head taunt me as I stare past him. Not only are there five when four or six would make infinitely more sense, but one of them is slightly crooked. It might not be noticeable to anyone else, but it makes my skin crawl.

“Nate?” His deep voice cuts through my thoughts. “The Fletcher account…” I don’t hear the rest of what he says because my eyes slide back to the fifth picture frame underneath the neat row of four. It’s a picture of us on the day I signed on with the company. He’s smiling. I’m not.

“Nate?” he says again.

“Yeah?”

“So what do you think?”

“I told you. We neutralized the threat to Fletcher Inc. It was some low-level hacker. Seb kicked him out and locked everything down before I even finished telling him what happened.”

He leans forward, lacing his fingers together on the mahogany desk. I knew naming me CEO was bullshit. He wants me to run the company while he makes up for lost time, yet he’s come back every single week since he “retired” to check up on me. And he doesn’t come to my office. No—he still summons me to his like I’m a lowly intern.

“I know that, Nathan.” My skin prickles at his use of my full name. He doesn’t usually call me Nathan. I can count on one hand the number of times he has. The only people who ever have were Gram, when she was angry, and…Harper.

Harper, who called me because she needed me. It’s been a few days since Daisy came barreling in through the front door, forcing me off the couch where Harper had been letting me hold her.

After I fucked her against the kitchen counter.

Raw. No condom because even given our history, I couldn’t deny her when she said she wanted to feel me.

It wasn’t just fucking, though. It felt different, like she was handing me all the vulnerability she’s ever felt right there in the light of day.

We’ve texted a few times since, but that’s it. Mostly about Daisy and Jace. Harper hasn’t heard from him since he left her house that day, and his phone has been going straight to voicemail.

“I meant the other thing,” my dad says.

“What?”

His brow twitches, irritation building across his forehead as if he’s repeating himself for the third time. “Our weekly dinners. I want to start them up again. It’s been too long.”

Oh.

“How about Wednesdays?”

“You mean tonight?”

“Unless you have something else going on? I’ve already checked with the kids. They’re free.”

The kids? Since when did he start referring to Emory and Luke as the kids? The thought turns my stomach. He barely has the right to claim us as his kids, let alone Luke.

“You’re the one who started the dinners,” he reminds me.

He’s right. When I first started working for my dad, I suggested we have dinner together once a week. It was more for Emory’s benefit than anything else. Despite everything, I wanted her to have some kind of relationship with him. Opa was long gone, Gram was in assisted living, and I’d done a shitty job trying to raise my little sister when I was barely more than a kid myself. I thought she deserved to have a parent in her life, even if it was him. The dinners lasted a while before life caught up with all of us, and they fizzled out.

I let out a long sigh. “Yeah, okay.”

He claps his hands together as my phone chimes with an incoming text. “Great. I’ll see you at seven.”

I nod, standing and giving the picture frames one last glance before stepping out into the hall. I pull my phone out, and a handful of texts from Seb fill the screen. But the last one is from Harper.