by Nancy Adams
Copyright
A Catastrophe of the Heart
Copyright © 2017 by Nancy Adams.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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Published by: Nancy Adams
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PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Around a long black marble table sat the ten men and women that made up the Techsoft board of directors, five on one side, four on the other and CEO Stan Bormann at the head, a rather smug look on his face. The only one missing of the eleven company directors was, of course, Sam. Of the nine members that weren’t Sam or Bormann, there’s not much to tell. Seven of them were what Sam would describe as ‘Bormann’s cronies,’ and the other two were Sue Reynolds and John Calloway, loyal to Sam.
At the other end of the table, opposite Bormann, stood Jenna Blackwell ready to present her findings to the board. She was visibly nervous, something that the astute John Calloway hadn’t missed, and he wondered what was about to transpire. As she went to begin, someone had to remind Jenna that she hadn’t yet placed a copy of the report in front of each of the board members. In a shaky voice, Jenna apologized, went to her briefcase, pulled out the reports and began handing them out. While she did this, many of the board members observed the woman’s trembling hands as she dropped the report in front of them. When Jenna walked past Bormann, Calloway watched as the CEO let out a mischievous smirk, nonchalantly pushing the report away with his finger the moment she placed it in front of him. There was a pained look on Jenna’s own face as she passed by him.
Calloway was sure that something was up. He’d had his suspicions that Bormann would attempt to disrupt the process in some way. But in order to protect himself, Calloway couldn’t go head to head with his own CEO, especially with Bormann’s powerful support network both within the boardroom and the company as a whole. All Johnny could do was sit back and see what would be revealed in the meeting, then do his best to support Sam in any way he could if it all went badly.
Jenna was now back in front of them. A few members of the board, including both Calloway and Reynolds, were already poking their noses into the report.
“Firstly,” Jenna said loudly, “I’d like to ask you to hold yourselves back from reading the report just yet. All my findings within that report I will sum up quickly for you now. You can turn to the paper copy for detail later.”
Calloway and Reynolds closed the reports they were reading, placed them down on the table in front and turned their eyes to Jenna.
“Okay,” Jenna began, wringing her hands together as she did. She certainly cut a forlorn figure standing in front of all those self-important people. “So,” she stuttered, “and I’m gonna be as brief as I can—like I said, all the detail is in the report. So I wanna say that having spent a month with Sam Burgess and witnessed his behavior both professionally and as a bystander living at his house—” Jenna instinctively paused and looked over at Bormann at this point. The CEO wore a huge grin and it made her sick. “Anyway,” she continued, “having witnessed Sam Burgess for the past month, living with him and taking regular therapy sessions with him, it is my evaluation that Sam does not need the six-month layoff from company activity. He is perfectly fit.”
With the declaration of these last words, Jenna looked directly into Bormann’s eyes and stated them as sternly as she could, as if they were the cuts of a blade and Bormann were their victim. Bormann’s grin dropped and was replaced by a barely hidden scowl. Meanwhile, Reynolds and Calloway allowed themselves to smile. The rest of the board simply shrugged.
“I hope that’s enough for you,” Jenna continued as she glared at Bormann. “Like I said, it is my professional recommendation that Sam be passed fit for service and brought back onto the board with immediate effect. Again: all the detail is in my report.”
“Well,” John Calloway said, “I think that will do, Mrs. Blackwell.” He then turned to Bormann and inquired, “Stan, do you have anything more for Mrs. Blackwell?” Bormann simply waved his hand in disgust and Calloway turned back to Jenna and, with a smiling face, added, “On behalf of myself and the rest of the board, I’d like to thank you, Mrs. Blackwell, for your service to Techsoft. Thank you.”
All Jenna could do was return him and the rest of the room a weak smile. After she had, she turned around, packed her suitcase as quickly as she could and left the room without saying another word or setting her eyes on another face.
As she walked down the empty corridor outside, heading toward the elevator, she felt like the world was falling apart around her. Her trembling legs made the ground feel as if it were shaking under her feet. She found the air heavy and oppressive, and barely made it to the lift doors.
When she did, she pressed the button and leant herself up against the panel. In her chest her heart raced along, and a frosty sweat had broken out all over her. A terrible nausea was building in her gut and she prayed that she didn’t vomit before getting into the elevator.
She was lucky; the lift arrived only a half-minute after she’d pressed the button and she was glad to find it completely empty. She flung herself inside and tapped the first floor button. As she moved steadily down through the floors, Jenna closed her eyes and leaned against the back wall.
The whole night before, after she’d gotten back from Bormann’s, Jenna had pondered over one of the hardest decisions of her life thus far. She spent the time until the early morning hours pacing the lounge of her Beverly Hills apartment, a large glass of wine in one h
and, going over it all in her head.
On one side of the scales there was complete professional and personal ruin, with Bormann destroying her if she didn’t have Sam recommended for a six-month layoff. But on the other, if she went along with the devilish CEO, she would ruin someone who in the last month she had begun to fall in love with. Since Henry, twelve years ago, Jenna had played the game, but had never fallen into anything that would constitute love. Sam had presented himself as a breath of air blown into her life; into her soul. He made her want to be with him, always. By destroying him in favor of herself, Jenna would be selfishly betraying him. It would ruin the bright light that had so recently entered her.
Bormann had instructed her to go home and immediately begin writing a new fake report for presentation at the board meeting. But every time she’d attempted to sit down at her laptop to write the duplicitous report, Jenna had become resentful that she was being so easily used by the wretched CEO. She’d angrily slam the laptop closed and return to pacing her home with another glass of wine.
Even as she’d awoken that morning after barely four hours sleep, Jenna hadn’t really been sure which path she would be taking that day.
The main thing stopping her from going against Bormann wasn’t the fact that she would personally be ruined, as you’d expect, although that was obviously a huge part of her deliberations. No. It was that Sam would also be dragged into the terrible mess of it all. His name would once again dance upon every news anchor’s lips, every newspaper headline. The press had only recently begun to lay off of him. This was sure to blow the whole thing back up again.
And now, as she climbed into her Wrangler Jeep, it was this thought that weighed most heavily on Jenna Blackwell’s mind. Driving out of the underground car park of the Techsoft L.A offices, she took her phone out of her bag and dialed Sam, placing the handset immediately to her ear.
“Hey, Jenna,” Sam answered warmly, “it’s a little earlier than three months, I thought—”
“Sam,” Jenna interrupted, a frantic tone to her voice, “Bormann knows. He’s spying on you. He’s broken into your home security system. The creepy son-of-a-bitch taped us having sex and threatened to blackmail me with it. He wanted me to write a report against you. But I didn’t, Sam. I gave my original report to the board just now and I think Bormann’s gonna release the tape. He threatened that he had people in the tabloid press who would out me as proposing a story on you before I came to see you. He’s going to have me ruined. The city psychiatric association will disbar me too. Sam, I don’t know what to do.”
“Okay,” he said in a solemn voice, his tone having a calming effect on Jenna, “don’t panic. Can you get yourself to LAX?”
“Yes,” Jenna muttered as she drove along with the slow-moving traffic of early morning downtown Los Angeles.
“Then go home, pack whatever you can fit into a suitcase and drive to LAX. I’ll send my plane. It’ll be better if you’re out here with me. Otherwise, the media will make your life a living hell.”
“But Sam, what about Bormann?”
“Bormann I’ll take on within the company. He’ll be for another day. I need to get stronger within Techsoft before I go for him. For now we need to regroup at the reserve. I know some very good people in PR. I’ll get them down here with us and we’ll do our best to blow this out of the water. Then, after that, I’ll come for Bormann.”
“Sam?” Jenna said tearily.
“Yes, Jenna?”
“I love you.”
“Me too,” Sam replied, before putting the phone down.
Jenna felt a wave of energy break through the lethargy she was feeling only moments ago. His reassuring tone and words had put her at ease and she felt protected by him. For the first time in so many years, Jenna felt she had the protection of another person.
At this terrible moment in her life, there was something deeply comforting in that.
CHAPTER TWO
“Pass me the roller,” Claude said to Jules as he stood at the top of the stepladder.
Jules did as he was asked and handed him up the tray of blue paint and the roller. They were painting the baby’s room—blue, of course! Margot and Juliette were out shopping for baby clothes. In two days’ time, Margot and Claude were due to fly out to Maine to pick up their son.
“I never asked,” Jules said up to Claude as the latter painted the ceiling, the two of them decked out in paint-splattered white overalls.
“You never asked what?” Claude returned.
“Why did you and Margot decide on the name David?”
“Mmm,” Claude mused out loud. “Well, it is the only thing that I remember of my papa: his name. When my mother was pregnant with me, he left her and my two brothers and my sister. My mama clearly hated him for it and never talked of him again, removing all his pictures from the house. All I ever knew of him was from my older siblings and I can only remember his name, David. When I was only six, my mama died and we were all separated. I ended up in a boy’s orphanage and was there until I left at sixteen. The rest of my family I never saw again.”
“I feel for you, man,” Jules let out softly.
“Ah, it’s okay. I’ve had a good life for the most part. My youth was very rocky, but I learnt to grow up and now I’m married to a beautiful woman, living in this magnificent house and am going to be a papa myself.”
“Hey! All’s well that ends well,” Jules said, grabbing his beer bottle and holding it up to Claude.
The latter took his own bottle from the top of the ladder and the two clicked them together in cheers.
“I’ll drink to that, mon ami,” Claude said as they did. “I’ll drink to that.”
The two swigged from their beers. Claude then put his back at the top of the ladder and continued painting.
“I guess it was my rocky youth,” Claude started saying as he did, “that made me glad that we’re adopting. I feel like I’m giving this boy something that was deprived from me: a family. I spent the whole of my childhood sleeping with twenty other boys in a dormitory with barred windows. The place was run by nuns too, so we never really had any men around, only the priest on the Sunday and the occasional visit from some official. So I never had a father figure the whole of my childhood. When I left, I knew nothing of the world. They just sent us out at sixteen with some papers and a little money and expected us to get on with it. It was like being dropped on a jogging machine while the belt is going a hundred miles an hour—of course, you will fall off! Kinda makes me a bit scared to be a father myself when I have no idea what a papa actually is.”
“It’ll all come natural to ya,” Jules said reassuringly. “I never knew my own father neither. I did, however, have many fathers. My ma was half-Paiute Native American, of the Northern Paiute. I grew up on a big old reserve in the middle of the Nevada desert. I was raised by all sorts of Native Americans and hippies—before the term ‘hippy’ was even invented. My ma was what you’d call promiscuous in that she enjoyed the company of men, and they enjoyed her. I didn’t mind the woman for it. After all, a man does it and he’s a man. A woman does it and she’s a whore. I guess men are in charge of the labels!”
“My own mama was a Catholic,” Claude mentioned. “She didn’t believe in divorce and she refused to commit adultery. She stayed married to a man who left her and his children to rot. Because of her religion, she prevented herself from ever enjoying the rebirth that would be offered by a new man. She denied us a father in a sense.”
“Yeah,” Jules exclaimed softly with a smile. “I’m glad my ma invited so many men into our lives.”
“But didn’t you feel a little put off by some of these guys? Not every guy wants a kid hanging around.”
“Ma was pretty cool. If they didn’t get on with me, she wouldn’t hesitate to kick them out. So the only ones that stayed around were guys whose company I enjoyed. I was taught to be a man mostly by a series of ‘uncles,’ who taught me about art, music, hunting, women and everything else I needed.
”
“But didn’t it break your heart each time you watched these men leave your life?”
“It did a lot of the time,” Jules admitted with a sad feeling. “But I got used to it at an early age and came to understand that nothing lasts, everything is transient. Anyway, I had my Uncle Ezhno for consistency.”
“Another one of your mother’s men?”
“No. Ezhno was actually my real uncle. He was full Paiute. His father was my mother’s father, so he was therefore her half-brother. Ezhno was my real guide through adolescence. He taught me survival skills—how to live in the wilderness, how to use the land to support you. It was he that placed the wanderlust in my heart and made me a traveler. He would take me out for weeks, walking through the desert with nothing but our clothes and a few basic items. We’d survive on animals caught in traps, digging wells for water or simply getting it out of a cactus. He was an exceptional man. Part of a dying culture and breed, being overtaken in the modern world and crushed into insignificance. I had hoped that one day I would have been able to pass on some of the things Ezhno taught me as a boy to my own son. But Danny got sick when he was only ten and I’d put it off until then. It was one of the main things that I thought of when we sat by his grave at his funeral. That I’m not gonna get to teach my boy how to survive in the wilderness.”
“Well,” Claude added, “you can always teach David how to survive in the wilderness. And maybe I can tag along and you can teach me how to live in the desert. You can teach us how to catch squirrels and which parts of its meat are best!”
Jules smiled up to him, before Claude turned once again and held out the tray.
“More paint, s’il vous plait,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
“This one’s sweet,” Juliette remarked softly as she held out a little white all-in-one baby suit with red strawberry patterning it all over.
