systems that haven't failed me once in thirty years and leave these projects of yours on the side."
If it were that simple, I would've already taken that route. But the audits and consulting contracts I was going after wouldn't leave time for wading through handwritten notes and dot-matrix printouts. I couldn't spend three hours on round trips from my office to Dad's because he accepted more work but didn't have the capacity for it given his mule-and-cart process.
"I can't do that, Dad. I hate to say this but I'm not going to do it. I thought you were going to start declining new clients since you've pulled back. I figured you'd offload some existing clients onto another firm or—"
"There has never been talk of sending clients elsewhere," he snapped. "If that was what you expected, you didn't get that idea from me."
"Fine. Great. Hearing you loud and clear now." I ran my fingertip over my eyebrow in a feeble attempt to ease the tension headache coiling there. "Then I'll hire and supervise a junior accountant to manage those clients. Is that acceptable to you?"
"When did you become so dismissive of these family operations? These people who are our neighbors and friends, they're our community. And you want to cast them aside to consult for big corporations."
"Not that it matters here but Shadyside and many others on my roster are family businesses," I said, mostly to myself.
Too engrossed in his own argument to my counterpoints, he continued, "Why would you think I'd want these clients, the ones I consider family, handled by some no-name twenty-four-year-old in your Boston office? They come to us because they trust us and that's a fact you refuse to accept. You just don't understand this business and I don't think I can try to teach you anymore."
The thing about wars was they weren't fought over one thing. It was never the pinpoint reason found in history books. Wars exploded out of a sequence of events that built over time, a series of pressure points twisting and closing in, a process of buckling down and hardening up. Then a line was crossed and there was no going back.
It seemed, in my throbbing-head view, we'd crossed several lines in the span of this hour.
"I don't want to say this," I started, "I haven't wanted to say it for months. A year, even. But I don't have any other choice. If you are determined to be the only person who makes decisions, if you want to continue focusing on your client roster while working fewer hours, and if you're going to block my way at every turn, I can't grow a future for this practice. It's time to stop forcing this arrangement and let me walk away. I'll call my attorney in the next few days and get her started on revising the LLC."
Without pausing to breathe, he replied, "That's not an option. You have to get these ideas out of your head and do the real work of—"
I didn't hear the rest because I made good on my promise and walked the fuck out. Storming down the hall, through the kitchen, out to the backyard. My feet carried me forward without conscious thought, skirting around my mother's raised vegetable beds, past the old cherry tree, down the mossed-over brick path to the brambly section of the yard my siblings and I long ago claimed as our hideout. It was the space at the far end of the lot, where the property line was cornered with two granite markers and the land gave way to the woods, where bushes and vines and trees gathered together to form a quiet, protected understory.
I walked out because I couldn't take it anymore. Because I'd heard it all before. Because the path forward was clear to me but not my father. No, the path was an offense to him. At once a dismissal and an indictment of his practice. But that wasn't it. I wanted to build something for myself—and by myself—just as he'd done. I didn't know why I had to do the same thing he did and I didn't know how he'd convinced himself I'd want that.
I didn't startle when I felt an arm slide around my waist or a head nod against my bicep. Part of me knew Zelda would follow. The other part wished for it.
"How much of that did you hear?" I asked. "The walls in that house are tissue paper."
"Enough," she replied, her knuckles gliding over my