of the responsibility is sitting on my shoulders, and everyone is waiting for Dad to decide what he’s going to do.
But professionally, I still don’t care. Yeah, I don’t want Kaede, or Courtney, or anyone in the company to be hurt or lose their jobs because of this, but as for me?
I don’t care. This corporation’s in good hands with Dad in charge, and if the future of this place doesn’t involve me . . . I can live with that. I don’t want it to come to that, but it’s not the most important thing in my life right now.
Violet is. She’s all I care about.
Dad’s sitting behind his desk when I walk in, his face still thundery. “Dad?”
“I assume Courtney found you?” Dad says, his voice so tight that I’m afraid he’ll snap a tooth if he bites his words off any harder.
“She did. I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“So you’ve said. But sorry won’t cut it this time. Do you even realize what you’ve done?” he growls, slamming his hand to his desk as he rises to his feet, pacing about the room.
“I’ve got board members yelling about stock prices, which have dropped by eighteen percent in the last twenty-four hours. That’s people’s lives, Ross! Their life savings shot because of your shenanigans. The shareholders are bitching about morality clauses, demanding my own son’s dismissal from the company I started from nothing. I’ve got lawyers calling, police calling, and the media . . .” He shakes his head. “The fucking media! Showing that sniveling shit Radcliffe on the news first thing this morning. And it’s trending on social media too. Congrats, you’ve gone viral,” he says sarcastically.
“Dad—” I say, trying to get a word in edgewise, but he’s on a roll.
“What is it your mother calls them? Culture vultures? They smell blood in the water and they’re hunting like sharks, hunting you, Son. And what am I to do about it?”
“Nothing,” I say sharply. “Let me fix this. I’m the one who fucked up. Let me fix it. At least I can drown myself in work and be useful for something.”
Dads laughs tersely. “You? Fix this? This whole thing is your mess, as always.”
I grit my teeth. “It’s never my mess! It’s you believing those parasites and the tales they make up over your own son. So what if I wasn’t ready to settle down and get married? It wasn’t your place to force me to do it, regardless of why you did it and whether your reasons were well-intentioned or not.” It’s the smallest give that I have, based on what Courtney told me about Dad’s thinking process and what he wants for my future.
“I didn’t force you to lie to everyone. You did that all on your own, didn’t you?” he booms.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say that it was Abi’s idea, just to show him that I’m not the only one who thinks he’s gone too far. But I can’t. I won’t throw my sister under the bus that way.
But Dad heard the video and knows that conversation was between Violet and Abi. I can see the moment he remembers that.
“And you got your sister involved in this too!”
Fine, if that’s how we’re doing this, then so be it.
“You know as well as I do that no one mixes Abi up in anything she doesn’t want to get mixed up in. She’s as hard-headed as you are.” It’s not a compliment, but he smiles slightly as if it is. “She knew you were pressuring me, she knew Violet needed this, and she put one and one together.”
“Except she came up with three, and we’re all paying the price.”
“No one is paying the price more than Violet,” I remind him, which sobers us both from the war of words we’re engaging in.
It’s a dash of cold water on both of our tempers. “We are never going to see eye to eye on this, so what do you want me to do? How do we move forward from where we are now?”
He sits down in his chair, his face stoic as he returns to the all-business mode he’s known for. “The company is putting out a press release, you will write an apology letter, the lawyers will do what we pay them to do, and the company will ride this out.”
“And us?” I say.
He sighs, turning in his chair to look out the window, so similar to what I did to Courtney just