by Bec Linder
“Are all rich people as stingy as you are?” I asked. “You’re the cheapest billionaire I know.”
“I’m not a billionaire,” he said.
“You basically are,” I said. “You would be if you went to work for your father.”
“Exactly,” he said, and pressed his lips together. “Let’s just order some food.”
Okay. I could take a hint. I sat on the edge of the bed and said, “What do you want?”
He scooted closer to me and pushed his face against my hip. “There’s a place down the street that does good sandwiches. And they deliver.”
“Okay,” I said, and tentatively stroked his hair. “I could do a grilled cheese with tomato soup. You think they have that on the menu?”
“Worth a shot,” he said.
I looked up the sandwich place on my phone and called in an order, one hand buried in his hair. “Half an hour,” I said, after I hung up.
“Great,” he said. “I’m hungry.” He kissed my hip. “Do you want me to oil your hair?”
I glanced down at him, a little surprised. “Really?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s still wet, right? I’ve got some olive oil. I’ll give you a scalp massage.”
“Only an idiot would say no to an offer like that,” I said.
I sat on the floor, leaning back against the bed, while Elliott sat on the mattress behind me and rubbed olive oil into my roots. It felt incredible. Nobody had done this for me since I was still a kid and my mother sat me down once a week to oil my hair. Elliott scratched gently at my scalp and I felt my eyelids sinking closed. If I were a cat, I would have purred.
“Did you do this for your Kenyan girlfriend?” I asked.
“Haiba,” he said. “Yes.”
“Are you still in touch with her?” I asked.
“Some,” he said. “Sometimes. We email a little. Her husband doesn’t approve of her contacting me, but she’s never cared too much about what men think.”
“A woman after my own heart,” I said. “Tell her thank you from me. She did all the hard work. It’s nice that you’re pre-trained. My fiancé was white, and he didn’t know about any of this stuff. One time he told me that my hair looked like a Brillo pad.”
“That wasn’t very nice of him,” Elliott said, so carefully neutral that I knew he was diplomatically withholding judgment.
“He didn’t always think before he spoke,” I said. “But the good parts made up for it. You know how it is. Nobody’s perfect.”
“Didn’t you accuse me of having a fetish?” he asked. “It sounds like you have some sort of fetish for white men.”
I laughed. “I don’t! I even promised myself I was done fooling around with white boys. So you should count yourself lucky.”
“I have to wonder why you would decide something like that,” he said.
I shrugged. I didn’t want to get into it, not now. “It’s a long story.”
“Right,” he said. “It usually is.” He took his hands out of my braids and bent down to kiss my neck. “How does your hair feel now? Moisturized?”
“For some reason, that question strikes me as being really creepy,” I said.
“Moisturized,” he said, and kissed my cheek. “Moist. Mmm. Get back up here.”
“You’re gross,” I said, laughing, but I went, and then we didn’t say anything for a while until the doorbell rang and Elliott had to put on some pants to go get our sandwiches.
TWENTY-ONE
Elliott
I did my best to convince Sadie to stay the night, but she insisted she needed to go have dinner with her parents and then sleep in her own bed, “Without you groping me all night.”
“I’m not a sleep-groper,” I said. “I prefer to fondle women when they’re awake.”
“Yeah, that’s what you say now,” she said, “but I know I’m going to wake up at 3am with you humping my ass. I need my beauty sleep if I’m going to charm a bunch of investors tomorrow.”
She wouldn’t budge, so I admitted defeat and walked her to the elevator.
“Get plenty of sleep,” she said, and pushed up on her tiptoes to kiss me. “We’re going to kick ass tomorrow.”
“If you say so,” I said, taking the opportunity to squeeze her ass.
She swatted at me, winked, and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Alone in my apartment, I fired up my laptop and sorted through my email. International development mailing list digest, cheap plane tickets to Dar, update from Kris about her latest dating antics—and an email from my mother’s law firm.
Shit. Kris had told me to call them… weeks ago, now, when we met for dinner, the last time I had seen her in person. It had completely slipped my mind. I opened the email and read through it quickly. I didn’t recognize the name of the lawyer who had sent the email, but Kris had told me it was some new guy. He gave me his phone number and asked me to call at my convenience.
I glanced at the clock on my computer. It was only 4:30, and any lawyer worth his salt would still be in the office for another couple of hours.
I pulled out my phone.
He answered on the second ring. “Sekeley Lightner, this is Mark Amery.”
“Mark, this is Elliott Sloane,” I said. “I just received your email. I have to apologize for not getting in touch sooner. My sister told me that you wanted to speak with me, but I’m in the process of launching a new company, and it completely slipped my mind.”
“I understand,” he said. “Thank you for calling. Ordinarily I would do this in person, but we need to get the paperwork signed and filed soon, or the trust is going to default to—”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry. Trust?”
Mark was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “I think you had better come by the office.”
I took a cab downtown. A mistake: it was rush hour, and traffic crawled maddeningly along. I stared out the window and tried to prepare myself for whatever the lawyer was about to tell me. If my mother had set up a trust that I didn’t know about, that Kris didn’t know about, and that Mark assumed I did know about—well, knowing my family, I expected drama, secret letters, hidden bank accounts, and a variety of intricate arrangements to keep my father in the dark.
Sekeley Lightner had its offices in a nondescript high-rise in the Financial District. Stepping out of the elevator, I experienced an immediate, crushing wave of painful reminiscence. After my mother’s death, and my belated return to New York, I had spent long, bitter hours in these offices, sorting out the details of my mother’s estate. She had made me executor, and I would rather have died myself than turned the duty over to my father. More than a decade ago, but change came slowly to old New York law firms, and all of the fixtures were the same, the furnishings, the wallpaper.
The receptionist—young, blond—smiled at me from behind her wide desk and said, “Can I help you?”
She was different, at least. Not someone I recognized. “I’m Elliott Sloane,” I said, “and I’m here to see Mark Amery.”
“Of course,” she said, perky, painfully young, and got up from the desk to lead me to Mark’s office.
Mark was younger than I expected, my age or even slightly younger. There was a time when all lawyers were impossibly old men, grey-haired and dignified, but I was older now, and starting to understand what my mother meant when she complained about her “boy dentist.” Soon I would be middle-aged and crotchety, and the world would be full of fresh-faced, adolescent doctors and lawyers, fetuses walking around in lab coats.
“I hope I’m not ruining your Friday night,” I said, after we shook hands and made our introductions.
“Not at all,” he said. “I’m low man on the totem pole, so I’ll be here until at least 10. The partners tell me that suffering builds character.”
A lawyer with a sense of humor. Wonders would never cease. I took the seat he gestured to, and he sat as well and pulled out a thick manila folder.
“I won’t waste time dancing around t
he issue,” he said. “Before she died, your mother established a trust, with you and your sisters as beneficiaries. The age of inheritance is set to when you turn thirty-five, which—”
“—is next month,” I said. “Right. That’s why you’ve been trying to get in touch with me.”
“Exactly,” Mark said. “Mr. Sloane, I’m not sure how much your mother told you about this trust—”
“Nothing,” I said. “I had no idea it existed until I spoke with you on the phone earlier today.”
He nodded, and opened the folder. He took a piece of paper from the top of the stack, glanced at it, and handed it to me.
I took it from him and glanced down at the page. The numbers made no sense to me at first, but my brain parsed them, mercilessly, and I looked up at Mark with the distinct sensation of having had the rug pulled out from under my feet. “This is millions of dollars,” I said, struggling to understand.
“Yes,” he said. “Two hundred million.”
“This isn’t possible,” I said. “My mother never worked a day in her life. How could she possibly—”
“It’s her own inheritance,” he said. “She never touched it. She married your father before she came into her own trust, and she decided to bequeath it to her children. She was a Vanderbilt, you know.”
“I know,” I said. My hands had started shaking. Two hundred million dollars, my God—
“It’s to be divided evenly among her surviving children,” he said. “Held in trust until each attains the age of thirty-five. Your sisters will receive their own portions on their thirty-fifth birthdays.”
I exhaled and looked down at the paper again. The numbers didn’t change. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m having some difficulty grasping the situation.”
“Understandable,” Mark said. “I’m sure it’s a lot to take in. If you aren’t ready to sign the paperwork this evening, we can certainly do it sometime next week instead.”
“There’s no need,” I said, numb, dumbfounded. “I’m ready now.”
I walked home afterward, four miles in the winter dusk. I wasn’t wearing the right shoes for it, and my feet ached by the time I got back to my apartment, but I needed the time and the cold breeze to clear my mind. Fifty million dollars in less than a month, and I would be free, free of my father forever, free to do whatever I wanted and create the changes I longed to see in the world.
And I hadn’t earned it, had done nothing to deserve it, and my father would never see it as a meaningful commentary on my worth as a human being.
I needed to call my sisters. Cassie would be furious. Julie would camp out at my doorstep until I gave her some money. Both of them would run to my father with the news as soon as they found out. Maybe I should call him first, which would at least deny him the pleasure of thinking he had caught me sneaking around.
I could imagine that conversation already. He would tell me that my mother’s weak female sensibilities had prompted her to establish the trust, that she knew I would never make anything of myself and wanted to provide for her pitiful, helpless offspring. A mother’s coddling, oppressive love. A son’s failure.
And what could I say in response to his accusations? What reply could I make that wasn’t a pathetic excuse?
Everything he would say to me would be true.
TWENTY-TWO
Sadie
I woke up on Saturday feeling like a little kid on Christmas morning. The conference started today, and it would go great. It had to. We had worked so hard, and if we weren’t able to secure an investor, I knew it would break Elliott’s heart. It would break mine. We were doing good work. We deserved funding.
Too bad the universe didn’t give a shit about justice.
The conference was being held in the Javits Center, in Hell’s Kitchen. I took the subway into Manhattan and bought myself a shitty cup of coffee in the labyrinthine bowels of Penn Station, and then fought up to the street through the crowds of tourists and commuters. The weather was overcast and drizzling, and the sidewalk outside the station bristled with umbrellas. I should have taken a cab.
The crowds cleared out a few blocks west of Penn Station, though, and I quickly made my way to the convention center. It was still early, not even 8:00, and the conference wasn’t set to start until 9, but the broad plaza in front of the center was already swarming with people. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much of a big deal this conference really was. I knew that it was important, and that Elliott was taking it very seriously, but seeing the size of the center and the number of people bustling around really drove home the fact that this was happening, now, today, and all of our hopes were on the line.
I went inside and checked in at the registration desk. The woman I spoke with gave me a name tag, a cheap canvas totebag filled with all sorts of crap that I didn’t bother sorting through, and a map. Elliott would be in the vendor room, setting up. I located it on the map and headed that way.
Elliott had arranged for all of our promotional materials to be delivered to the center, but we still needed to get everything set up and organized. The vendor room was a massive, high-ceiling exhibition hall, cold as a mausoleum and buzzing with activity. Even half-full—the conference wasn’t all that large—it was still impressive. I wandered through the endless aisles of tables and posters and banners, feeling a little overwhelmed, until I finally spotted Elliott’s blond head above the crowd. Thank God he was so tall.
His face lit up as he saw me approaching, and my stomach flipped over in response to the honest, uncomplicated pleasure I saw there. He was so happy to see me, and I hadn’t even done anything. I was just walking toward him. I wasn’t even wearing a particularly nice dress.
“This is it,” he said, as I came within earshot. “The big day.”
I smiled at him, charmed by his enthusiasm. He was usually so stoic that it was nice to see him excited about something for a change. “It’ll go great,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “I just have to survive giving this talk.”
He was speaking in a session that afternoon. “What time is it?” I asked.
“Oh no,” he said. “You don’t get to watch. You have to stay here and man the booth.”
“I think I can leave for fifteen minutes,” I said. “You just don’t want me to watch your talk.”
“I plead the Fifth,” he said, and then, very blatantly changing the subject, “Help me set up this banner.”
I rolled my eyes and helped him.
By 9:00, our booth was plastered with posters, and our table was covered with neatly organized stacks of pamphlets and business cards. We had spent entirely too long wrestling with the banner stand, but it was up, finally, and as glossy and eye-catching and well-designed as anyone could have hoped. There was a box beneath the table filled with water bottles and snacks.
We were ready.
“Just leave it to me,” I told Elliott, as we stood there surveying our work. “I’m going to sweet-talk some nice old man into leaving us his entire estate.”
To my surprise, he leaned down and hugged me: very chaste, his hands on my mid-back and no lower, and then he kissed my cheek and said, “Sadie, I couldn’t have done this without you.”
I patted his back, feeling awkward but touched. I was just a graphic designer, and anyone competent could have done the same work for him; but it was sweet of him to say. “It’ll go great,” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”
He released me and stepped back, running one hand over his hair like he was a little embarrassed. “I’ll worry no matter what,” he said, “but thanks for the vote of confidence.”
And then the first conference attendees wandered into the vendor room.
We spent the next couple of hours talking to people. Or, well, mostly Elliott talked. I handed out pamphlets and answered basic questions for the people who were just wandering through, and beside me, Elliott lectured the true believers, the ones who had come to our booth because they were interested in his work. It was a
marvel. I had seen flashes of his charisma, but now he was so earnest and charming and impassioned that it was like he had been body-snatched. The people listening to him nodded thoughtfully and flipped through the pamphlets and asked pointed questions. Business cards were exchanged. Hands were shaken.
During a brief lull when there wasn’t anybody at our booth, Elliott turned to me and slumped his shoulders, miming exhaustion.
“You’re doing great,” I said. “I didn’t even think you knew that many words.”
He grinned at me, unruffled. “My father made me take speech lessons for years,” he said. “I was a very timid child. Shy. I still can’t make small talk worth a damn, but I’m very good at performing like a trained monkey.”
“Your father sounds horrible,” I said passionately. “I hope I meet him so I can tell him what an enormous jerk he is.”
He took a sip from his water bottle and raised his eyebrows at me. “I’ll arrange a meeting.”
Shortly before 11, the room emptied out like someone had pulled the stopper from a drain. I looked at Elliott, confused, and he said, “Plenary session at 11. It’s one of the conference’s headline speakers, so everyone wants to go.”
“Don’t you want to go?” I asked. “You should. I can hold down the fort here.”
“I—actually, yes,” he said. “I’d like to go. Thanks. It’s just an hour. I’ll bring you some lunch.”
“No pickles,” I said.
Even with the plenary session, there were still enough people milling around the vendor room that I kept very busy. I talked to an older white lady wearing an actual mink stole and, ludicrously, opera gloves. She paused by the booth and looked down her nose at me, and I braced myself for whatever thinly veiled racist bullshit was about to come out of her mouth, but she only said, “You don’t look like your name is Elliott Sloane.”
“You’ve got me there,” I said, “but I’m happy to talk to you about the company, if you have questions. We’re doing some very exciting work with ceramic water filters.”
