Prologue
Birthright
Tyson
Roses remind me of death. For as long as I can remember, they were the only flowers we took to my father’s tombstone on our monthly visits. That there’s a bunch sitting in the vase next to the chair where I’m waiting to learn my fate only adds to the weight of impending doom that’s been hanging over my neck like the Sword of Damocles.
My phone rings, and the name “Kayleigh” pops up on my screen. I immediately decline the call. She has a lot of fucking nerve calling me after what she’s done.
And everything she could have cost me.
My mother has already made it clear that there will be repercussions for my lack of judgment and discretion, but her bark has always been worse than her bite. Not that this meeting she called is going to be great. But if her tongue was a knife, the riot act she read me would have flayed all the meat from my bones.
It’s been nearly a week since that happened, and I can still feel the sting of her rebuke. So it’s nice to know the worst is behind me. My mother is a hard, unyielding matriarch who fought her way from a life of poverty in Kingston, Jamaica to the head of one of the largest companies in the world. She didn’t get there by cutting anyone, including herself, slack.
And the only soft spot she has is the place in her heart that belongs to me.
She has contentious relationships with both my siblings. She and my older brother, Remington, sometimes go months without speaking. But I’ve always been different.
In a family of overachievers, I’ve been considered the runt of the litter.
I still live in the shade cast by Remington, who was not only nicknamed The Legend, but was, in many ways, truly legendary. Basketball, law, life—he was great at all of it. My sister Regan was less outgoing but just as impressive as Remi. They’re twins, born nearly five years before me.
My grandfather, may he burn in hell, used to say that they got all the good genes, and I got whatever was left.
I had a speech delay that I didn’t shake until I was in eighth grade, asthma attacks that made emergency room visits a way of life, and team sports were a no-fly zone. When people invariably measured us against each other, I always came up short. It didn’t help that I was born five months after my mother became a widow and had to step into the role her husband’s death left empty at my family’s rapidly expanding food retail service and real estate business.
When I was born, she didn’t take a break from her career to raise me. Instead, she hired an army of nannies, drivers, cooks, and au pairs who made sure I was everywhere I needed to be.
But on the weekends, she never worked, and that was our time. We spent nearly every waking minute together from Friday night to Monday morning. I spent all week getting myself ready to impress her. I’d draw her pictures or memorize a poem and make a big show of presenting it. Even at that tender age, I understood my place in the hierarchy of her life.
The company came first, everything else got whatever she had left to give.
Wilde World was started by my great-grandfather as a grocery business. And for the first fifty years of its life, that’s all it was. Not that it was anything to sniff at. By the time my parents got married, Wilde World was one of the largest grocers in the state of Texas
Until my father, spurred on by his ambitious, brilliant new wife, proposed that the company use its immense capital to buy a plot of land and build a subdivision on it.
It was the stuff of dreams, but my father was a brilliant salesman, and my mother was an even more brilliant business strategist.
My father didn’t see his brainchild come to life. He died soon after the first tract of homeowners broke ground. And my grandfather, who was still ruling the company with an iron fist, didn’t share the power with my mother the way my father would have. But she proved herself to be indispensable, and even though she didn’t get the credit for it, I knew she was still the brains behind the operation.
I was fifteen when my grandfather suffered a stroke that forced him to retire, and my mother stepped up to the helm.
When she’s interviewed, she always says that she was simply standing in my father’s stead. But the truth is, she was born to build and lead, and if my father was alive, I’m sure he’d agree and let her.
Fifteen years of her leadership have seen Wilde go from a regional grocer to an international food service company.
At that point, she barely had time to say hello in the mornings, much less spend her weekends with me. But I'd tired of them by then, anyway.
I had a massive growth spurt when I was 14. I outgrew my asthma and made the straight A honor roll my freshman year of high school. I joined the track and field and football teams and started working out. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was in the body I was born in.
I felt ready to live up to my last name. Because all I wanted was to be a Wilde—in name and deed.
My older brother was the heir apparent, but I knew that he had his eye on a different prize. And when he chose to go to law school, abandoning the expectation that he’d run this company after my mother, I saw the opportunity and stepped up.
I’ve worked at Wilde since I was 14. By the time I graduated from college and started in a junior level marketing role, I was a bona fide workaholic. All work and no play made for a very dull life. Girls liked me, and I liked them back. Especially the older ones.
But I’d also let my brother’s missteps when it came to women be a lesson, and I made sure my mother didn’t catch a whiff of my relationships.
Until I let the lines between business and my personal life blur. I met a girl at happy hour at The Belvedere. When she told me she was in town interviewing for a position at Wilde World, I used my name to get her back to my place. Looking back now, I can see clearly how stupid I was. I helped her prep for her interview. She got the job, and for the workaholic in me, having her in the building meant I didn’t need to leave the office for anything. I thought I was falling in love with her, and I trusted her. She offered to help me with a presentation I was giving for my first real attempt at landing an account on my own, and I gladly accepted.
I made my pitch, and when the company called me back, I was sure it was to tell me that they loved our presentation and wanted to do business. Instead, they informed me that the pitch I presented was identical to one given by a competitor just two days before. They believed I’d stolen their work and informed me that Wilde World would be blacklisted from doing business with them.
Going to my mother with that news last week was bad.
But finding out that Kayleigh was a plant from the competitor’s company—that the whole thing, including bumping into each other that night, was a setup. That was the worst.
She swore it was only that way in the beginning. But I didn’t believe anything she said.
“Tyson, Mrs. Wilde will see you now,” my mother’s assistant calls from behind her desk. I nod and walk on leaden legs into her office.
She’s writing, head down, and I move to the chairs in front of her desk.
“Don’t sit. This won’t take long,” she says in a monotone voice, her dark head still bent to her task.
“Okay.”
She writes a few more words and then slams her leatherbound portfolio closed with a loud slap. She looks up at me, and the flash of steel in her eyes, the same dark as midnight color as mine, pierces me to the bone. “I have made a decision,” she says, her voice still without intonation. “But first, I want to explain something to you.”