by Nina Post
Her father sat back at his desk, put on his glasses, and looked down at the papers in front of him. “Better if you had never been born. We have no such daughter and we will not see your face again.” He dismissed her with a wave.
Cate felt gut-punched. She stumbled back and reached out for support, expecting a wall and finding only an artificial tree.
“Well, that is absolutely the last straw.” Benjamin walked over to her, took her by the shoulders and fixed his cool blue eyes on hers. In a low voice, he said, “You will get through this.” He turned to her father, said “Call my assistant if you really want the documents to be changed,” then left the room. She envied him for that, because she couldn’t move, despite her desperate desire to be anywhere else.
Cate knew her father, or thought she did. If he felt he didn’t have her support, he would make it a war of wills, and would never go back on what he said. She knew he would retreat to his office for days after this, and woe to anyone who approached. She worried about the stress this would cause him, even if he brought it on himself. He was more vulnerable than they realized, and she had a feeling things could go awry if he was around the wrong people. Which her sisters and their husbands were.
“Take care of him,” she told her sisters. She felt drugged, and when she moved, it was like walking in a swimming pool. The anxiety that plagued her was worse in the fearing of something like this, but this was beyond her darkest suspicions and fears. Cate had always worried about something bad happening to him, had always worried about losing him, but she couldn’t have foreseen this, couldn’t have imagined this.
Gaelen sneered. “You’re delusional. He just disowned you, or don’t you get that?”
Cate barely registered her sister’s words.
“Get out,” her father growled, looking up from the papers on his desk as though surprised she was still there. “Get out of this house!” His voice was like a roar that knocked her back, made her stumble. A powerful fist gripped her heart. Heinz Ollesch’s, she thought, absurdly.
Cate feared that her act of defiance just destroyed everything. It had, clearly — but she had a family of her own, still.
When had he started to despise her? When had he stopped loving her? Was she a terrible person to deserve this? Who was she if she wasn’t a Lyr anymore? Who was she if her family felt this way about her?
She walked out the library doors, went upstairs, and into her room. Her head felt twice its normal weight. 90% of her was unavailable, but 10% of her managed to take over and get a suitcase out of the closet. 10% Cate put clothes into it. Socks and underwear. Faded jeans, a couple of pants. Two Oxford shirts, her favorite t-shirts, a couple of sweaters. Jacket. Some photos she kept in a fabric box. The old leather-bound copy of Alice in Wonderland that was her mother’s. A few of her most cherished books. A watch her father gave her, which she hesitated over, put back where it was, then got again. A bag of basic grooming stuff. Her electric toothbrush. Her hand automatically went up to check she was wearing her necklace. Then 10% Cate took a last look at the room and went back down the stairs.
Gaelen cut her off at the bottom step, looking like the devil’s licorice whip with her dark red designer dress and towering heels. “Nice try,” she said, flashing her canines with ‘nice.’
Nice try at what, Cate almost said, not making any sense of it, but she didn’t care anymore. Her mind was reeling, her body fixed in a steady shiver.
“But it backfired, didn’t it?” Gaelen put an arm up, hand on the wall, cornering her in. Cate looked away, toward the door. What backfired? God, she was so tired. When did she get so tired?
“And now, Little Miss Favorite, you are fucked.” Gaelen pointed a slim finger and moved it in a circle. Cate pushed past her, barely registering what Gaelen was saying.
“Hey, sis?”
Cate paused. When she wasn’t looking, something had pounded her with a meat hammer.
“Have a good night.” Gaelen’s lips curved in a slow-burn Cheshire cat smile and she raised her hand in a wave before going back into the library, leaving the doors open.
10% Cate released her death-grip of the bannister and went out the front doors into the unusually heavy rain. The wind blew over her.
She left the heavy front doors open, then went back and closed them, then got in her car. She drove down the winding driveway and then off Belvedere Island, thinking it was a shame she didn’t get to tell her father her news.
She drove over the Golden Gate Bridge south to San Francisco, and sometime after that, the reality of what happened hit 90% Cate like a slap from God. Her eyes filled with tears as a car veered too close to her on the mainland. She skidded and collided with something that sent her car spinning, then tumbling upside down until it smashed to a stop.
Chapter 6
San Francisco — November 2013
Lyr Logistics encompassed six floors of a Class A office tower in the Financial District. As Gaelen strode through the halls, she flushed with pleasure at the gigantic white banners that read Invigoration, Fortification, Ingenuity, and at her headshot adorning placards and walls. Nothing made her more satisfied than knowing this was hers, finally, though she had an annoying, Cate-like anxiety that the feeling wasn’t as strong as she’d hoped.
Her father had let her work at Lyr Logistics between semesters of college, but her youth withered on the vine while she learned Zaanics. She sacrificed time she could have spent on things she desperately wanted to do instead: being competitive and winning. Showing off her beauty, her intelligence, her prowess in … well, everything.
Every day after school and every weekend, she studied the language with her father. Even now, it made her want to scream. When she was fifteen, she sat down at the dining room table, and had a state of the nation summit with herself on one of her precious weekend days, planning college and her MBA and the stepping stones leading to CEO of Lyr Logistics.
But at least she and Romane had been allowed to work there. Cate didn’t even have that. Their father saw something in her, Gaelen — not in his spiteful, envious second daughter, and not in his anxious, naive youngest daughter. Gaelen was born with a quality that told people she should have these things. So even though she felt like a virgin tossed into the caldera of the Zaanics volcano, she learned what she could from the experience, and what she took away was a determination to live her life how she wanted. There was little else she could do to leverage those hours of study in a language no one but her father and her dead ancestors knew.
Evidently, being born a Lyr had its advantages and disadvantages. But Gaelen prided herself on a certain kind of alchemy, spinning wheat into gold. And she had already started to spin her gold.
Her father hadn’t trained her to run Lyr Logistics — maybe he was waiting for his daughters to magically turn into sons — but she paid close attention. She listened, she worked hard. But now, even though he himself had decreed that the board name Gaelen as CEO, he was making it as difficult as possible for her, which was not acceptable. Her father made his choices and he had to live with them.
She pressed a button on her phone. “Yuji, get in here.”
A moment later, her assistant was in her office, tablet computer in hand.
“Did Mr. Lyr fire you for saying something to Peter?” Gaelen asked.
Yuji nodded. “He did.”
Gaelen crossed her legs and sat back in her chair. “What did you say to my father’s ineffectual assistant?”
“Peter wanted to get something from your office for Mr. Lyr,” Yuji answered. “I told Peter that would not be happening. I also mentioned that the office was no longer Mr. Lyr’s. And I might have asked if his water bowl had his name on it.”
Her father wouldn’t even recognize his former office, so what the hell did he think was still there? She’d hired an interior designer to completely transform the appearance from its former shades of brown, cream, and brass to its current red, cream, and gold. The first thing she did after the redesign was re
place her father’s Remington statue with her statue of a scorpion gripping the testicles of a bull. It inspired her. But even though the office was hers in both title and aesthetics, her father remained a problem.
Gaelen had sold the house sooner than expected, thanks to a red-hot Bay Area real estate market. She generously took in her father to live with her and her flavorless pudding of a husband, at least until she found a new house that wasn’t so horrifically expensive to maintain.
It was constant conflict, having her father at the house. He yelled at them for the smallest thing and resented every single one of her decisions, especially when she dismissed most of his retinue — his advisors, investors, hanger-ons. She cancelled all but one of his country club memberships, and limited him to no more than two golfing trips per year. She was in charge now, and had to put her stamp on things. With the shareholder meeting coming up, she had already started to eliminate needless expenses and frivolous perks. Her father’s whole generation was entitled and coddled, and he had enjoyed his excesses for too long.
“Tell me when he does anything else,” she said to Yuji, going back to some papers she had to sign.
Yuji cleared his throat.
Gaelen sighed and put down the papers she was holding. “What is it?”
“There’s more.” Yuji looked pained and Gaelen made a circular motion with her hand. “Mr. Lyr fired your second administrative assistant, as well as the entire web marketing team.”
Delusion, and petty retaliation. “What? Why did he fire the web marketing team?”
“Mr. Lyr said he didn’t understand what they do here,” Yuji said.
“I’ll fix it. What else.”
“He scared off the printer tech before the tech replaced the fuser module.”
“We’ve been waiting days for that. Wonderful. Anything else?”
“He changed the music in the common areas back to his, um, vintage favorites.”
Gaelen drummed her nails on the desk. “My father doesn’t like music. He thinks it’s too affecting, and doesn’t trust it. No, the music must be whatever they were using before.” She closed her eyes for a long moment. “He forgets that I’m in charge. Or doesn’t take it seriously. He’s under the false impression that he retains the same authority.”
“How do you suggest we handle it?” Yuki asked politely.
“My father shouldn’t be handled with kid gloves. This is the time for sledgehammers and bullhorns. The longer he wrongly believes he still has a place in this company, the more the employees will think he’s still in charge, when he’s most susceptible to deceiving himself.”
Yuji tilted his head. He had been her assistant long enough that she knew what the gesture meant.
“You disagree?”
“With all respect, I wonder if perhaps Mr. Lyr might be handled more effectively with a Trojan horse of flattery.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Encourage his actions with commands disguised as flattery.”
“You may be right. Flatter him into doing what he wouldn’t do otherwise. But I just don’t have the patience for it anymore. I’ve flattered the old fool long enough.”
Gaelen blocked her father’s path after he parked his silver Mercedes SL in her pristinely white garage. It had just started to rain, and fog completely obscured the bridge and city.
“Papa, I need to talk to you.”
“Can’t it wait?” Brusque impatience. As though he had better things to do.
“No, it can’t.” She paused, took a breath. “Papa, you need to accept that I run Lyr Logistics now. You have no authority there. You are not in charge of my employees.”
“It is still my company!”
Would he ever let it go? “A company your father groomed you to run,” she pointed out. “A company your father signed over to you. And then you signed it over to me, or don’t you remember? To me and to Romane,” she added like it was a reluctant afterthought.
“Of course I remember, you stone-hearted — ”
“Uh-uh,” Gaelen said, taking a step closer to him. “I can tell you now to watch your words. You’re a guest in our house. You visit Lyr Logistics at my say. You can’t act with impunity, not anymore.”
He gestured dismissively and started toward the door that led to the house. “I still have a daughter left. I’ll go stay with her. It will be a nice change of pace, staying with a daughter who isn’t spiteful.”
Gaelen barked a harsh laugh. Romane was nothing but spiteful. “And she is all too familiar with your poor behavior,” she said in a cold tone.
“How dare you!”
“There’s more to it than money,” Gaelen said. “Don’t you know that by now? Don’t you think we needed you after our mother died?”
Lyr glowered, went around her, and closed the door behind him, hard. Gaelen made a sound of frustration and went out the open garage bay as Philip came around from the front door. “He’s giving you more trouble?” he said, when he reached her, holding a red golf umbrella over her.
“He does nothing but cause trouble for me,” Gaelen said. “That’s my face in every room and hallway of the company. Those are my banners, my slogan. He relinquished his control but refuses to leave. Everyone will start thinking he’s still their boss. They’ll just fall back into it and I’ll turn into something like a senior vice president, even while I’m the CEO.”
“You may be overstating the danger,” her husband said gently.
“That’s a hell of a lot safer than trusting he’ll have no ill effect on me. Who knows who could try to damage us through him? Someone could see our vulnerability and take advantage. Better that I put a stop to this now. It’s dangerous for the company and the family.”
She brought out her phone, held it under the center of the umbrella and called Yuji. “Call my sister and tell her that Mr. Lyr will be going to her house. Inform her of what we discussed.” She clicked off and pocketed the phone.
“We’re sending him to stay with Romane?” Philip asked.
“I’ve done my part already. It’s too much, dealing with him here and at work. It’s like he’s purposely trying to make me crazy. Maybe he’s trying to gaslight me out.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
Gaelen crossed her arms under her chest. “Really? What exactly is your evidence?”
“Just a feeling, I suppose. Why not call Romane yourself?”
“That’s what Yuji is for, to do the things I don’t want to do or shouldn’t have to do.”
“Why doesn’t your father just stay at the house?”
“The house sold.”
Philip tilted his head. “Already? That was incredibly fast.”
She shrugged. “We expected it to stay on the market longer, but it sold right away to a newly minted billionaire. Guy just made a bundle in an IPO and I guess the money was burning a hole in his pocket.”
He tilted his head. “Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”
“The company owned the house, Philip. They used it for the annual retreat and derived no benefit the other fifty-one weeks of the year, so it was an obvious target when I began looking for non-core assets to divest. Besides, I don’t need to keep you apprised of every little thing.”
He looked down at her shoes, then back up. “Are you still buying him a condo or a smaller house, then?”
“We haven’t found one yet,” Gaelen said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a tad preoccupied.”
“Right. You’re far too busy to find your own father a place to live.”
“Don’t be bitchy, Philip. We have someone on it. For now, he’s staying with us, though I’m sending him to stay with Romane. Look, I have to go back to the office.” Gaelen waved her hand towards her father’s car. “He’s a terrible distraction. I barely got any work done today. I just wanted to stop by and see that he wasn’t giving you any trouble.”
“I see.”
She opened the next garage bay to reveal her own car. Philip ga
ve her a kiss and held the umbrella over her until she got to the garage.
“When should I expect you back?” he asked.
“I doubt I’ll be home until the middle of the night, so you go to sleep without me and I’ll see you by breakfast.”
He nodded and gave her a tense smile that she ignored.
The roar of the Ferrari engine filled the hangar-sized garage like an orchestra and Philip stepped well out of the way.
Benjamin heard a car pull up in his driveway and emitted a world-weary sigh. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He smoothed out his pants and brushed some lint off the sleeves of his shirt as he went to the door, looking through the peephole. Aaron Lyr.
He opened the door and saw that Lyr parked his SL askew in the narrow driveway. The front right tire crushed his carefully tended bed of chrysanthemums into a smear. He sighed and opened the door.
“Mr. Lyr. What are you doing here?”
Lyr pushed past his attorney into the foyer. “Everything is ruined, Nightjar.”
As soon as Benjamin closed the door, there was a second knock. Lyr gestured as though exhausted. “That’s just my assistant. My fractious daughter let me keep the one.”
Benjamin let in a rain-soaked Peter. “Lovely home,” Peter said, with a polite but long-suffering smile.
Lyr paced the hallway like a caged lion.
“Thank you,” Benjamin said with a close-mouthed smile. “Please come in.”
“I’ve spent hours in thought. I fear that I’ve acted impetuously and … rashly, Nightjar.”
Benjamin noted Lyr used the same word he himself had used when Lyr disowned Cate.
“I was clinging to my authority, I realize that, but now I hope it dies. It’s worth nothing, Benjamin. Gaelen sold my own house from underneath me, fired my most trusted advisors, and has done everything possible to render me helpless.” He wiped water off his forehead. “Where is Romane? I want to speak with her!”
Benjamin exchanged a glance with Peter, who shook his head and lifted his shoulders in a small shrug.
