New York Billionaires Series

“I’m planning to. But if you feel tired, stay home.”

She shakes her head. “I’m coming. It’s my opportunity to learn more about you.”

I snort. “Right. The Spanish Inquisition. If you ask too many questions I’ll banish you to the first floor.”

“That’s okay. I’m sure there will be interesting artifacts to uncover. Childhood trophies… your baby pictures.”

“If you’re looking for anything sentimental, you’ll be disappointed. But come on, let’s go.”

She hums along to the song on the radio as I drive us out to the house. The familiar route takes us out of the city and into the suburban paradise.

I’ll sort through papers tonight. That’s the goal, anyway, even if I know Cecilia might be a distraction. But she’d said she wanted to do more friendship things, whatever that meant. Not relationship-things, though. I’d thought that was what she’d been asking for, and had opened my mouth to agree when she’d cut me off with a staunch denial.

Which was just as good.

Relationships invariably soured, grew full of expectations and whininess and women saying one thing while meaning something different.

I look at Cecilia. She has her legs crossed, fingers playing with the hem of her skirt, as she sings along to the radio. Somehow I doubt she would be like that. She’s always been honest and straight with me. The trouble, because there’s always trouble, might be less this time. Might be something we could work through together.

Might even be worth it.

An hour later, she sits in my grandfather’s study with me, cross-legged on the floor. A giant binder of photographs is open on her lap.

I’ve glanced at her several times already. It feels raw, exposing, to have her see the albums I never knew he kept. Half of me wants nothing more than to snatch them away.

But that would be admitting they mean something.

I return to the neatly kept ledgers of expenses on his desk instead. He has dozens of these, records dating back decades. There are things here he expected me to pick up after he died. Things I’ve neglected to.

Including the yearly expenses he paid for cemetery upkeep. I look at the receipt until the letters blur. Of course he paid for that. And with him dead, the responsibility falls to me. How had I not realized that before?

Are my parents’ graves overgrown now? Devoid of flowers?

“Oh,” Cecilia says. “You were adorable.”

I tear my gaze away, focusing on her. She’s wearing a soft smile. “I can’t believe you actually found baby pictures.”

“This goes in the keep pile.” She closes the leather-bound album with a snap and stacks it on top of the others in the corner.

I close the ledger I’m reading. Gravesite maintenance. Things I’ve never thought about, not since I moved away from this house. I can’t even remember the last time I was there, and for the first time in years, guilt punches me in the gut.

“Hey,” she says. “Are you okay?”© 2024 Nôv/el/Dram/a.Org.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“It must be hard, being here. Surrounded by all his stuff.”

I brace my hand against the desk. His desk. Suddenly, my hands look foreign to me. A grown man’s hands on a desk I remember so vividly from childhood. I’d been sent here to do my homework on occasion. He’d sit in the armchair and watch with a book in his hand.

I’d considered it punishment, then. Now I wonder if it wasn’t his attempt at getting us to spend time together.

“He sat here so often, even after he retired. Work was such a big part of who he was.”

Her eyes soften. “Part of his self-image.”

“Yes,” I say. I stroke the leather inlay with a single finger. “He loved trivia and quizzes. It was the only game we played, him and I. There should be an old Trivial Pursuit box around here somewhere.”

“Trivia, huh?”

“Yeah. The questions got outdated eventually, and we’d end up in arguments about whether or not to accept the answer on the card or the actual truth. You know, Moscow is the capital of the Soviet Union. That sort of thing.”

“Did it get heated?”

“Yes. Stupidly so. We were both pretty stubborn.”

She smiles. “You, stubborn?”

“Hard to believe, is it?”

“Incomprehensible.”

I look at the neat rows of books surrounding us, gaze wandering. “On the anniversary of my parents’ and brother’s death, he’d order pizza. We never had takeout pizza otherwise. I think he assumed greasy pizza was the best way to take a nine-year-old boy’s mind off of their deaths.”

“What kind of pizza did you get?”

“Always pepperoni for him, and I chose something different every time. We’d eat it in the backyard.” I reach for his letter opener and look down at the engraved handle. R. St. Clair. “He always made sure he was home that week. No business trips or meetings.”

Even the last few years, we’d had dinner together on that day. We’d skipped the pizza. Our conversations hadn’t been lively or deep. They’d been what they always had been. Businesslike and demanding and, running like a current beneath the surface, our shared loss.

“That was thoughtful of him,” she says. “Do you miss him?”

“You’ve asked me that before.”

“I know. But sometimes questions have different answers.”

I brace my hands against the desk, the gold of my wedding band hard against the oak. A grown man’s hands indeed, like my father’s.

“Yes,” I say. “He was the last piece, you know? Connecting me back to my family. The last source of information about my mother and father.”

“He was your father’s father?”

She rises from the floor in a smooth movement. Dark curls fall down her back, tickling the edge of her tank top. She walks to the wall and the framed picture that hangs there.

She plucks it off the wall, and my heart feels like it’s standing still in my chest. “These are your parents?”

She turns toward me, frame gripped tightly. There’s a smile on her lips. “You look like your dad a bit, but you have your mother’s smile. Not that you use it often enough.”

I swallow. “Right.”