Sloane was the closest thing I had to a support system, and she didn’t even like me. But she was here, I wanted her here, and that was more than I could say for anyone else in my life.
She examined me, her face softer than usual. “But I might be the wrong person to ask about grief. I can’t…” A beat of hesitation. “I can’t cry.”
That surprised me enough to shake off some of my self-loathing. “Figuratively?”
“Literally.” She rubbed her thumb across the beads of her friendship bracelet as if debating whether to elaborate.
“I can cry if I’m in pain,” she finally said. “But I’ve never cried out of sadness. I’ve been that way since I was young. I didn’t cry when our family cat died or when my favorite grandmother passed. I didn’t shed a single tear when my fiancé—” She stopped abruptly, her face darkening for a split second before her composure slid back into place with a near-audible clank. “Anyway, you’re not the only one who’s felt like a monster for not crying when you should.”
She grabbed the bottle of scotch from the counter and poured some into a crystal tumbler. It was her third of the evening.
Fiancé. There were rumors she’d been engaged years ago, but no one could confirm it—until now. Sloane was notoriously private about her personal life, and it helped that she’d been living in London at the time, away from the vicious Manhattan gossip machine.
I watched in silence as she sipped her drink.
Perfect hair. Perfect clothes. Perfect skin. She was the picture of flawlessness, but I was starting to see the cracks beneath her polished façade.
Instead of detracting from her beauty, they added to it.
They made her more real, like she wasn’t an elusive dream that would slip through my fingers if I tried to touch her.
“We seem to have more and more in common,” I drawled. Shitty fathers. Commitment issues. Major need of therapy.
Who said adults couldn’t bond over trauma?
Sloane must’ve expected me to pry about her fiancé because her shoulders visibly relaxed when I lifted my glass instead.
“To monsters.”
A soft gleam brightened her eyes, and she raised her glass in turn. “To monsters.”
We drank in silence. The house was dark, the clock ticked toward one, and an army of reporters gathered outside the gates, waiting to turn my father’s death into a media circus.
But that was a problem for the morning. For now, I basked in the warmth of my drink and Sloane’s presence.
She wasn’t a friend or family, and on a bad day, she made the Titanic iceberg look like a tropical paradise. And yet, despite all that, there was no one else I would rather spend tonight with.
Saturday marked my last gasp of breath before the tsunami of press and paperwork descended.
The next few days blew by in a whirlwind of funeral arrangements (extravagant), media requests (incessant but unanswered save for the press statement Sloane had crafted), and legalese (complicated and headache-inducing).
My father had left meticulous directions for his funeral, so all we had to do was execute them.
His will was an entirely different matter.
The Tuesday after his passing, I gathered in the library along with my family, Eduardo, Sloane, and Santos, our estate lawyer.
The reading of the will started off as expected.
Tía Lupe received the vacation house in Uruguay, Tío Esteban received my father’s rare car collection, so on and so forth.
Then it got to me, and apparently, my father had made a lastminute change to the terms of my inheritance.
Murmurs rippled through the room at the news, and I straightened when Santos started reading the conditions.
“To my son Xavier, I bequeath all remaining fixed and liquid assets, totaling seven point nine billion dollars, provided he assumes the chief executive officer position before the day of his thirtieth birthday and serves the role for a minimum of five consecutive years thereafter. The company must turn a profit in each of those five years, and he must fulfill the chief executive officer position to the best of his abilities as determined by a preselected committee every six months, starting from his official first day as CEO. Should he not meet the above terms, all remaining fixed and liquid assets shall be distributed to charity according to the terms below.”
The room erupted before Santos read the next paragraph. “All assets to charity?” Tía Lupe screeched. “I’m his sister, and I get a measly vacation home while charity gets eight billion dollars?”
“You must’ve read that wrong. There’s no way Alberto would do that…”
“Xavier as CEO? Does he want to run the company into the ground?”
“This is outrageous! I’m calling my own lawyers…”
Spanish shouts and curses ricocheted off the walls like bullets as my family devolved into chaos.
Throughout it all, Eduardo, Sloane, and I were the only ones who didn’t utter a word. They sat on either side of me, Eduardo’s face pensive, Sloane’s impassive. Across the room, Santos maintained a neutral expression as he waited for the indignation to die down.
The first line of my inheritance clause rang in my head.
I bequeath all remaining fixed and liquid assets, totaling seven point nine billion dollars, provided he assumes the chief executive officer position…before the day of his thirtieth birthday.
My thirtieth birthday was in six months. Of course, my father knew that; trust the bastard to force my hand even in death.
The shouting matches around me retreated before an onslaught of memories.
