The blare of horns from the cars behind me brings both Ingrid’s and Rhys’s head up. And Rhys stiffens as I approach and Ingrid squints at me over her mask.
“You again,” Ingrid says when I stop six feet away from them.
Then she turns to Rhys with a quizzical look and asks, “Rhys, what’s going on? What is she doing here?”
I shouldn’t look. I don’t want to look. But my eyes drop down to her ring finger anyway. The one she waved in my face the last time we met.
And sure enough, there’s a ring on it. Even grander and bigger than the last time.
Last time I was cool Cynda. Shocked but determined to look like I wasn’t as I left the beautiful couple to their beautiful lives.
But this time pain stabs through me. I raise my eyes to Rhys, hurt beyond all belief. “I guess you two were on another break?”
Rhys just regards me stonily.
And we stare each other down as I answer Ingrid, “I used to work here. Before your fiancé bought my father’s practice and fired me. That’s what I’m doing here.”
Ingrid visibly jolts. Then laughs. Of course, it sounds like a beautiful tinkle even behind a mask. “Oh, so that is why you decided to move here and acquire this particular practice. I thought you saw something in the numbers that I didn’t.”
“Something in the numbers?” I repeat, really not understanding where she’s going with this.
“Oh, no! Have you really not told her yet?” Ingrid looks between Rhys and me, her eyes twinkling with amusement. “I’d figured that was the reason you broke up after what you told me about her.”
“What did he tell you about me?” I ask Ingrid.
Ingrid waits for Rhys. But he continues to just stand there, glaring down at me, like I’m the one who has some explaining to do. Why is he out here in these streets hugging up on his ex after claiming for two weeks’ straight he still hadn’t gotten over our fling?
“Come now, darling,” Ingrid urges a still silent Rhys. “She’ll eventually find out.”
She waits for a few more seconds, then sighs when he still refuses to answer.
“I’m engaged, but not to…what was that adorable Welsh middle name he used with you again?” She lifts her eyes as if struggling to remember. “Ah yes, I believe it was Rhys. Well, I’m not engaged to him. My fiancée is a Danish count. And that’s not a step down as one might think. At least his family is still a constitutional monarchy.”
“Congratulations,” I say to her. My heart fills up with a weird relief even though Rhys and I aren’t supposed to be anything to each other anymore.
Then, I frown, realizing I still have no idea what Ingrid’s talking about. Why is she here with Rhys if she’s engaged to somebody else? Why would she think I would think a Danish count was a step down from an English doctor?
And why is Rhys refusing to talk?
I have so many questions, but Ingrid keeps going like we’re completely caught up. “Thank you for your congratulations. Though I fear that means I’ll have to move back to Europe. I must say, I’ll miss Chicago.”
She throws Rhys a cheeky smile. “And my boss is quite unhappy about having to find another executive he trusts to take my place as the VP of Acquisitions for DBCare. I can’t say I blame him. It’s doubtful he’ll be able to find another with my attention to detail.”
I tilt my head. “DBCare? That medical conglomerate that eats up clinics?” I ask. “You’re their VP of Acquisitions?”
Ingrid slides another disbelieving look toward Rhys over her mask. “Yes, I am. How naughty of Rhys not to tell you that.”
I shake my head. “Okay, you two aren’t engaged this time. So then why are you here? During a pandemic?”
Ingrid sniffs as if that question is insulting. “COVID or no COVID, I always check on all our acquisitions myself.”
“Your acquisition?” I repeat. Then I turn on Rhys. “Are you selling my father’s practice? To the company I hate most?”
Rhys finally speaks, “What I do with the practice I acquired is none of your business.”
Then Ingrid says, “Also, it should be noted that Rhys isn’t selling the practice. We already own it. You see, my family is the Bylund in Drossel-Bylund Care and his is the Drossel.”
Again, I find myself shaking my head. “No, that’s not right….”
I distinctly remember reading something about how DBCare was owned by some defunct royal family, the Drossels of Drosselholz. Basically they were the family who used to rule over the country until they were deposed after World War I and made royals in historical name only.
“But Rhys isn’t a…” I start to say.
I stop, the truth suddenly blaring in my head like a code red alarm along with his first date mention of having twelve names.
“Actually he is,” Ingrid answers with another tinkling laugh like this is all in good fun. “His formal title is Prince Aleksander of Drosselholz. But our many employees know him as Alek Drossel, the President of DBCare. And this practice is our latest acquisition.”
Wait…what?
The Fine Prince is actually a prince? And even more shocking than that, he’s the President of DBCare!
For a moment I can hear nothing. There’s only Rhys’s steel-grey eyes staring back at me, an emotionless blank.
Then I hear everything.
Ingrid explaining how Rhys occasionally uses, “one of his many names” to acquire certain well-placed practices when the doctors who own them don’t want to sell to DBCare.
The horns blaring as cars cut around my Honda, still idling in the street.
The birds tweeting happily above even as the ground seems to crack underneath my feet.
But one question shines above all the noise.
“Buying my father’s practice on behalf of DBCare, the one company you knew he didn’t want to sell to. Was this…was this all part of your revenge?” I ask Rhys.
A few cold beats. And then, Rhys finally speaks, “Yes.”
It’s officially spring now, but his voice is as cold as winter.
Chapter Twenty-One
That “Yes” echoes in my head as I return to the house.
“Where are the groceries?” A asks when I come through the kitchen door empty-handed.
I don’t answer. Just walk up the stairs in a daze.
It was only six months. But because of that six months, the one thing my father didn’t ever want is happening.
His practice is gone. It’s gone in a nefarious deal to a man who would literally move to small town Missouri in the middle of a pandemic. All to get back at me for dumping him via text.
He’d called himself a nutter during our time in the back house. I thought it had been a self-deprecating joke. But in my room, I pull out my laptop to try to figure out exactly who this psycho is.
Sure enough, there’s Rhys’s picture in the Leadership Team section with the title Director of Acquisitions below his real name, Aleksander Drossel.
No wonder he’d seemed so hard at work for the last two weeks, even though he didn’t have to report for work in Guadalajara.
A scroll through his bio makes no reference to his royal title, but it does mention that he used to be the company’s Chief Medical Officer and even completed a year of fieldwork in a St. Louis hospital before taking on his current role.
A follow-up Wikipedia search informs me that DBCare used to be just DrosselCare and its biggest competitor was Bylund Holdings, a Swedish healthcare corporation. But sometime around the late aughts, the two companies started going through the multi-year process of combining their forces. Supposedly to be able to offer their clients more in the way of health solutions.
But I’m reading between a lot of lines as I do my research. And from what I’m figuring, DrosselCare joined forces with Bylund Holdings, so that they could acquire even more pharmacies and clinics in the much less regulated United States than they could in Europe. Aleksander’s and Ingrid’s marriage should have been the jewel in the two familie
s’ new conglomerate crown.
But then I came along.
Do you know what I gave up to be with you?
That question had seemed so hyperbolic when he’d been taking me roughly in the back house. But further research using Aleksander Drossel’s real name reveals all sorts of German language gossip nuggets, which I read with the help of GoogleTranslate.
Apparently, Prince really was one of his names. His father, who would have been the Crown Prince of Drosselholz if their line had been allowed to continue, had married a woman by the name of Gwendolyn Prince, the daughter of a Welsh business magnate. And Rhys hadn’t been lying about what a good cook she was. She actually had a few cooking shows, including one that sounded like a German-language version of the Great British Bake Off.
Not surprisingly, since their mother was so busy, all three of the Drosselholz children had been sent off to boarding school in England which accounted for Rhys’s accent. From what I could see, Rhys’s younger sister and brother had received most of the online press, with Alek often being reduced to a line about how he had made the rather boring choice of becoming a doctor and going to work for DBCare.
Most of the articles I found about him involved his split from Ingrid, who like his mother, was the daughter of a wealthy businessman. The breakup had come right around the time when the final merger papers were supposed to be signed after the two families had been operating together in good faith for years. Quite a few business papers wondered if the deal would even go through. And other less reputable sources wondered if Aleksander’s father would allow him to continue on with the stateside version of the company. Apparently, Aleksander was estranged from his family for a few months after calling off the wedding.
Reading all those scandalized articles, a new question breaks through my daze of anger.
Why? Why did he throw away his future as the prince of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate for me?
A knock sounds on the door, interrupting any possible conclusion I could have drawn.
“Yes, A?” I call out. It’s easy to distinguish the twins’ knocks. Unfortunately, I think pretty much every geeky boy who grew up watching Big Bang Theory thinks frenetic knocking is the best way to get someone to answer the door. Thanks for that, Sheldon.
A opens the door. “Can you come out here?” he asks, his eyes wide with panic. “Sis is acting crazy!”
“What are you doing?” I find E throwing clothes into a suitcase after following A into her room.
“Packing!” she answers. Her chest is heaving like packing is some kind of cardio.
But it’s not exertion that has her breathing hard, I surmise with a quick diagnosis. She’s angry. After years of watching her lose roles to less talented actresses because the former head of the Thespian club couldn’t envision a brown girl in a traditionally White role, I recognized this routine. She was angry, but she had trouble expressing her anger. So she packed all that anger into action, huffing and puffing around until it faded and she could go on with her life.
Most often she cleaned. Usually just her room. But last year, when a much-less talented cheerleader named Clara Reynolds was cast as Sandy in Grease, simply because she looked, as the former Thespian director put it, “more believable” in the part, E had cleaned the entire house from top to bottom.
However, now she’s packing. I glance down at the suitcase then back up at her, “Where do you think you’re going exactly?”
“Pittsburgh!” she answers.
I find myself shaking my head again for the second time that day. “Carnegie Mellon doesn’t start until the fall,” I remind her.
If then. All the news reports are still up in the air about whether many colleges and universities will be able to re-open in the fall.
“I found a room to sublet in Pittsburgh. This girl whose roommate bailed on the lease without warning her. She says I can have the room for $600 a month.”
“Where are you going to get $600?” I ask.
“I called my dad. He said he’d pay it.”
“Is this the same dad that’s been promising to visit you for three years straight and hasn’t shown up once?” I ask.
E abruptly stops throwing clothes into her suitcase. “You don’t know him?” Her voice is indignant. “He’s had a lot of time to think now that he’s not touring. And he said he was sorry for not being a better dad to me before.”
I’m sure he’s had a lot of time to think. Tucked away wherever he is right now because it’s definitely not here in Missouri taking care of his kids.
Don’t touch your mouth, nose, or eyes, all the COVID experts say. But it’s really hard not to scrub a weary hand over my face as I ask, “How long is he going to pay this rent? What happens when the world opens back up and he goes back on tour?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. I’ll get a job.”
“A job where?”
“Somewhere! Anywhere!” E grabs her favorite pillow. “I don’t know why you’re asking me all these stupid questions.”
“I’m asking you all these logical questions because I’m responsible for you.” I snatch the pillow with the silk case out of her hands before she can throw that in the suitcase, too. “I don’t know what this is really about, but if you’d just wait until the fall, I’ll have enough money from rent and the sale of the house to buy us all an apartment.”
“You’re not responsible for us,” E yells, tugging frantically on the pillow. “And fact check, we don’t want to live with you!”
I let go of the pillow and E goes stumbling back a few steps. She obviously hadn’t expected me to give up the fight.
“What? What do you mean?” I ask E. “That’s the plan. That was the plan all along.”
I don’t remember A’s still in the room with us until he says, “E, don’t…C’mon.”
E’s eyes dart from her brother back to me, and it seems like she’s making a decision when she says, “No, that was your plan all along. We never wanted to keep on living with you after college. That’s why we both applied to go to C.M.U.—you know a school all the way across the country.”
Her words don’t just shock me. They cut me, like a knife slicing into my stomach. “No… no…that’s not true.”
I look to A. “That’s not true, right?”
He drops his head and looks to the side. “We didn’t want to hurt your feelings. But we’re eighteen. We just want to start doing stuff for ourselves.”
“You want to start doing stuff for yourselves?” I repeat, my voice caustic. “Well, how about paying me rent then? How about giving me back the last three years I—”
I stop. The “wasted on you brats” fading with the memory of how their mom left.
When the twins and I had staged an intervention about her drinking, she’d turned on us like a caged tiger.
“You ruined my body! My prospects! You want me to go to rehab, talk to somebody about my problems! The only problems I have is all the years I wasted on you brats!”
Her temper tantrum had reduced her twins to tears and apologies she didn’t deserve. And then the next morning she was gone. And the twins had cried like her leaving was all their fault.
And I’d vowed never to hurt them like that. To be there for them, no matter what.
But there’s a difference between that vow and what I was planning to do by moving to Pittsburgh with them.
That new realization hits me like a tornado-level wind. Rhys…he’d been right. At least about this.
I sink on to the bed. “I’m sorry,” I tell them. “I’m sorry I clung to you like that. I should have spent this year figuring out how to let you go. Not smothering you.”
Teenagers, they act so tough.
But hearing my apology melts E out of her defensive stance.
“No, I’m sorry!” She sits down on the bed and throws her arms around my neck. “You’re the only one who’s ever cared enough to smother us. I love you. I love you so much. I just need to get out of here.”
> I shake my head at her. “But why? Am I really that terrible to live with?”
E shakes her head. “No, it’s not you. It’s not…”
Her face collapses, and that’s when it all comes out in a torrent of tears.
As it turns out, E not being able to see and talk face-to-face with her non-related classmates did not dial down her high school drama one bit.
After all the unreturned messages, August announced that he had decided to take someone else to virtual prom. Somebody who actually returned his calls. Someone who didn’t play games.
“Clara Reynolds,” E announces with an annoyed huff.
I huff right along with her. Clara Reynolds was the cheerleader who’d been perfectly happy accepting roles she didn’t deserve. But she’d acted a total fool when E finally got cast as Cinderella in Into the Woods. As opposed to admitting to herself that she just wasn’t talented enough to land the part of Cinderella in the spring musical, she’d claimed that she’d been edged out of the role because E had made such a stink about no actresses of color getting major roles in the school productions for three years straight.
It had been peak entitlement and the kind of microaggression you can’t really battle against. So hearing that she’d been replaced by Clara of all people had upset E to the point of wanting to “get the hell out of this stupid, backwater town!”
By the time E’s done with her story, we’re all sitting on the edge of her bed, with A and I on either side of her.
“Did you tell him you were grounded and didn’t have your phone?” A asks. “He’d understand if you told him that probably and uninvite Clara.”
E shakes her head mournfully. “That’s not how it works.”
“Why not?” A asks. “That’s what I would do if I could get a girl to like me.”
“Boys like August don’t care about what you have going on in real life. If you’re not available when they want you, they move on to the next girl,” E answers A like she’s explaining the simple concept of why you have to wash your hands to a six-year-old. “He’s probably hooking up with Clara as we speak. And if I try to get him to like me again, he’ll just make fun of me with all his friends. Like, look at that dumb, trashy girl. She’s so thirsty.”
Cynda and the City Doctor: 50 Loving States, Missouri (QUARANTALES Book 1) Page 14
