“I’m going to repeat what I said a few minutes ago, Dad, and this time I want you to really listen. I love you, but I’m on vacation. I’ll be out of contact until my return in a week. As in, I’m not going to have my phone on.” Her voice was clogged with emotion. She’d hardly ever gone against her father’s wishes. Growing up, she’d idolized him. “I need this time to sort some things out. Please, please, let me have it.” The longer she was away the more she realized how much she really didn’t love her career, and her job took up the bulk of her waking hours. She was almost thirty and already having thoughts of “Is this all there is?”
“It’s all yours,” he answered, his voice slightly softer. “I hope you come to your senses.”
She did, too, but she somehow thought they probably had differing definitions of what that meant.
She hung up and then turned off the phone, the final vibration humming against her palm before she put it down on the table.
Then she jumped a little as another phone appeared beside hers, and Eric came to stand beside her chair. “Room for one more?” he asked softly.
She shouldn’t be so glad to see him, but she was. She held out a hand, inviting him to take a seat. “I’m not sure I’m very good company,” she said.
“Me either. I see you couldn’t stay off yours, either.” He nodded at the phones side by side on the glass table, and she sighed.
“It’s off now. And isn’t going back on again.”
He smiled at her then. “Wouldn’t it be fun to go down and chuck them into the ocean? I mean, really pull your arm back and let it fly?”
“Tempting, but then I’d be polluting the ocean.”
“Are you always such a rule follower?”
She sighed. “Sadly, yes. You?”
“Not so much. Not that I actually break rules. Just that not everyone likes how I apply them.”
“Ah. Because you’re the bad guy who swoops in and takes over.”
“I’m the bad guy who comes in and buys the business, straight up. I make good deals. People get upset because employees lose their jobs, but me buying the business helps create jobs somewhere else. The truth is, if the business had gone bankrupt, they would have lost their jobs anyway.”
She looked at him for a moment and then laughed lightly. “You know, neither of us are in professions where people like us very much. Well, my clients like me, I suppose. And I’m sure your investors like you.”
“Most of the time.”
“Yes, most of the time.”
And yet saying it made her feel a little bit sorry. She didn’t have to be liked by everyone; she’d said goodbye to that long ago. But she might like to like herself a bit more, when all was said and done.
He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “We disassemble things, don’t we, Molly? Break it up into pieces.”
“Yeah.”
He turned his head and looked over at her. “And we’re both good at it. We’ve made a lot of money.”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
With his eyes locked with hers, he acknowledged, “I know why I’m so mad about the divorce. Or at least one of the reasons. Her lawyer did to me what I usually do with the businesses I buy. Except I wasn’t the one who got the best deal.”
That was what bothered him about the divorce? Losing?
She took a sip of wine and called him on it. “So you’re mad about losing, but not about the end of the marriage?”
His gaze slid away and his expression darkened. “That’s not what I meant.”
“But it’s what you said. I just... I guess I wonder if you really don’t care that your marriage ended. If it’s all about the thirty million.”
Silence settled around them, warm and slightly uncomfortable in the summer evening. The breeze felt different here, smelled different from Cape Cod and the Atlantic somehow. It was wilder. More...primitive. Or perhaps that was just the setting. The river, the strait that ran between the island and the British Columbia coast and the rugged mountains made everything in Molly’s life feel like it was half a world away.
“You’re asking if I loved her,” he said, and to her surprise his voice sounded a little hoarse.