I didn’t know much about my father’s other children outside of his marriage to my mother. But I’d heard enough rumors over the years to know they existed.
And among them, I was the worst. At least, in the eyes of the only man who mattered.
More than a decade and a half after learning the first lesson of love and hate, I had wound up learning the second as he looked at me on the eve of my law school graduation, his golden eyes hardened beneath a set of bushy dark eyebrows, the hair above his heavy lids thicker than the strands on his balding head. He crosses his arms.
“You’re the student body president of your Harvard Law Class, for Chrissakes. And you’re telling me…” he shifts on his feet in my tiny wooden kitchen, “that you’re not walking across that goddamned stage?”
I rotate towards him, feeling the icy breath from the open fridge door. I reach inside. Standing in my silk-covered cap and gown that I’ve only recently decided won’t ever see the graduation stage, I grab for the glass brown bottle stashed on the refrigerator shelf, swigging from its open neck.
Funny. I don’t taste a thing. The heavy robe on my frame brushes the black laces of my spit-shined shoes, and I blink once, pushing beer and bile back down my throat, washing both away with a feeling of guilt to follow. I swallow that too, leveling my glare.
“Technically, I didn’t tell you anything. The dean did the lovely honors of doing that.”
“The dean is a good friend.” My father stares.
“How nice for you both.”
“He wants you to succeed, Heath. Just as much as I do.”
“No.” I shake my head, swiping the tassels across my brow to the side, my grin a sad reply. “What Dean Whitmore wants is a whisky bottle without an end and a college-aged mouth around his shriveled cock. Let’s not pretend he cares what happens to me.”
“But do you care?” My father’s chest heaves hard. “Do you care at all that you’re throwing three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of education away? Do you care that you’re choosing to forego graduation from the most prestigious law school in the goddamned country?”
“Sure I do.” I smile weakly, the expression turning sardonic as I stare into eyes so much like mine. I nod slowly. “I care enough not to continue this sham.”
“Exactly what sham are you referring to…?” His teeth tighten as he grits the words. “Son?” He cocks an eyebrow up to the sky. “The sham of a spoiled heir, wasting his God-given talent? Giving it away to gambling and entrepreneurial fantasies and girls?”
“It’s women, Dad. Not girls. They’re all over the age of eighteen. Wish the same could be said for the ones I found with the Dean.”
He glares. “You’re ungrateful.”
“By ungrateful, you mean not blindly obedient.” I glare back.
“My father graduated from Harvard.”
“Good for Grandpa.”
“His father went to Harvard before him.”
“And I guess you’re scolding me for not sending gifts or…?”
He continues, ignoring me. “And yet here you are. Living each day like it’s your last. Spitting in the face of me, the firm, hell—the entire institution that is Law.”
“The dramatics are a nice touch, Dad. Really.” I remove the heavy cap from my head. “After you retire from the firm, I’m sure a nice television stint awaits.”
“You’re a grade-A fuck-up, you know that?”
I exhale as his teeth start to chatter. Here it comes. The Fitzgerald Sparrow I know best.
The beast behind the mask.
It was only a matter of time, really.
“You have respect for nothing but yourself,” he hisses.
“Oh, I do actually. I have respect for the last shred of decency left in me. The ones that won’t let me shake the hand of a philandering, predator of an academic dean with more skeletons in his closet than the Arlington National Cemetery. The ones that won’t let me support a system so slanted towards the rich that the Ivy League booster club shits gold. An institutional circle of back-scratchers so self-absorbed that decent fucking men like my goddamned roommate Jesse Somerset can barely scrape a job because Ivy Legacy free-loaders like me have gifted them all on a silver platter.”
I stare into the deepening depths of my father’s furious eyes.
He steps forward. His steps are slow and deliberate.
“You may have the money my father left you in his will when he passed. But you’ll never have any stake in the firm. You mark my words, Heath… You’ll be back, begging, before five years is out.”
I grin.
This is not my first rodeo, and I’m way better at gambling than my father’s ever been. This won’t be my first roll of the dice…nor my last. I raise my chin, uttering infamous last words.
“Wanna bet?”
I raised my hand for him to shake, my fingers lightly trembling as I waited. I held in a deep breath, counting to myself.
One. Two.
It’s been seven years since that day, and the lessons are still the same. Now sitting against leather seat of my rented Audi, among the Manhattan snow, I realize I’ve learned another lesson along the way…
The most important?
That love is imperfect. It’s messy. Full of fucking flaws.
And life is only two beats from changing.
Ever notice that? It never gets to three.
It surprises you before you get to the third number, dropping the bottom out. And nothing dropped the bottom out from me more than the note that was passed to me in that seedy little strip club.
I still remember reading its crooked text.
“Get rid of the redhead.”
That’s what the note said.
No “hi’s” or “hello’s.” No niceties to top off the lap-dance. No half-assed attempt at even pretending to be civil or even vague.
My mystery letter-writer was long past the point of being subtle. And when I’d found that Violet had snuck from my sheets, slipped out before the early morning sun, I nearly broke my neck to get to Brett and Elsie’s, checked the King & Sparrow office before coming up completely empty. My cell phone out of service due to the winter storm, I visited everywhere I thought my sexy vixen would be, wrangling Jesse in as my unwilling assistant.
I bark at him from a set of walkie-talkies I abruptly picked up from the only open store, my voice husky.
“Follow her.”
I can hear nothing but Jesse’s breath as he hesitates on the other end of the line.
“Follow her, you said?” he repeats, as if he hasn’t heard me first time.
“Yes,” I oblige him between gritted teeth. “Follow her.”
“As in…now?” I hear muttered over the scratchy speaker.
“No, tomorrow, Jess. Yes. Follow her right now.”
“But…” The sound of the street around him drones his husky voice out. “She just walked out of her apartment building. Not too long after she walked in. Maybe she’s going to get some breakfast…”
I stare at the walkie, listening to the voice coming out of it, wondering —just a little bit—why the hell my father hired him in the first place.
The best trial lawyer in the country was clueless in terms of espionage, and if he hadn’t been my college best friend, I’d have fired his ass on the spot for gross incompetence.