“Oh, well,” he started as if he might object. His eyes fell on his wife, already inside and looking at him with pointed blinking eyes and he sighed. “Alright then.”
I didn’t do the grand tour or anything. Just showed them straight to the living room so we could talk.
“We’re selling the company today,” Mom started.
“Wewere,” Dad corrected her with a bit of a harumph. “But it might fall through.”
I felt my nails dig into the arms of the chair, my palms heating as I thought about the reason for their visit. If they were selling and they were in Seaside, it could only mean one of two things.
“Selling to who?” I asked, because suddenly it mattered.
“Fernandez and Ferguson,” Dad provided. “Mainly it was Fernandez that showed interest, but apparently the deal was too large for just one side of their merger.”
I nodded, the information spiraling in my brain, determining where it wanted to land. Clay had asked me on multiple occasionshow much I wanted to know about my family, and I’d vehemently told him nothing. I wondered where this sat on the ‘tell me anyway, asshole’spectrum. And her. Was there any chance that she’d known this was happening and understood that the implications circled back to me? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know yet, because I wasn’t sure what it even meant to me.
“So what happened?” I asked. “You said youweregoing to sell. Did it not work out?”
Did I want it to work out? Did the stabbing feeling in the middle of my chest mean that Iwantedthe company that was the background of my childhood to be sold off to people who could never care for the generations of work sown into those walls the way we did?
I think it meant the opposite. Even after all that bolstering with my mom, I think deep down I didn’t expect it to be going so fast, nor was I ready for it, which scared me more.
How could I not be ready to give up something I’d essentially given up a decade ago? How could I still not be ready to say goodbye? Because my sister was tied into those very walls every bit as much as me and saying goodbye to it meant saying goodbye to her.
Mom’s hand fluttered to her collar. She lifted it and smoothed it down titteringly as she spoke. “We were just about to sign when a girl came in and interrupted the meeting. She confiscated the contracts and asked us to leave.”
“A… girl?” The apprehensive feeling Alta’s message had given me finally landed on something concrete. “What girl?”
“Dark hair, mid-height, looked a lot like the Fernandez family,” Dad said.
So,mygirl. Great.
“What did she say?” I asked, my voice not my own, my heartbeat pulsating through my entire body.
Dad’s head shook. “Just that we would have to renegotiate.”
“And are you?” I asked. “Are you still going to sell to them?”
“Well,” Dad started, his voice the auditory version of him stalling at the front door, his eyes surveying me closely. “That’s why we wanted to talk to you.”
I swallowed. “You want to talk to me? About what?”
“About the company, son,” he said. “Aboutyourcompany.”
And there it was, the shameful truth of it all.
I stiffened. “Don’t call it that.”
“Why not? Not saying it doesn’t make it any less true,” he grumbled.
“It does,” I snapped, hating the idea that something so detrimental to our family was mine. I tried toerase the fact of it with the birth of Ink and Mar among other things. “I have other businesses now.Betterbusinesses. And I released those rights years ago. So don’t call it that. Nothing you say is going to bring me anywhere near that thing again. I’m not like you, I can’t just… I can’t just be there and not think of her.”
“And you think we can?” Dad’s voice was low and guarded.
My shoulders bowed under the weight of my regret. A year after my sister left, I inherited the family company as I was always supposed to. I became the official owner of the hypothetical vehicle for my sister’s disappearance.
I didn’t take it well. I didn’t take it at all. I couldn’t. I couldn’t sit there and claim something that had claimed my sister in all the wrong ways. That was claiming my family who, months earlier, had been great and was suddenly this shell of despair and forsaken memories.
So I left. My dad seemed all too happy to keep the business under his control for the time being anyway. What difference would it make if I left? If Mar could go, then so could I.
