Home For The Holidays

I took screenshots of it all to add to the pile of information I’d been collecting on Tessa, and then it was on to the next move. I already knew her work contacts and the number of the HR person at her firm. Thank heavens, my dad hadn’t hired her when she was fishing for a job at the company headquarters. It must burn her ass that Deidre still has a standing invitation to work for us anytime she’d like.

I know she’s tried many times to get my parents to cut ties with Deidre and the girls, but she knows better than to pull that shit with me around. Anyhoo, after I got what I needed from Troy’s phone, I turned my attention back to piecing Tessa’s life together.

There was one guy going back a few years that she made mention of. There were no pictures of him, but his name was mentioned quite a bit. I wish I’d had the foresight to clone her damn phone before I went no contact, but I got more than enough from going back and forth between her posts and her friends’. And that’s where I found Jared Macalister.

At first, the name didn’t register; there’s no way he could be the Jared Macalister that everyone in my circle knows and talks about. The software guru who’d made his first billion by twenty-five and who’d turned his interest to what was now the hottest game on the market. But the more I dug, the more it seemed plausible. And then I found the deleted files, and though there was only one very outdated picture of him, there was no mistaking that it was indeed the man himself.

I was so confused at this point. Why would Tessa leave a man like him to be with my brother? Granted, they’d been broken up for a couple of years before she got with Tom, but still. Tom, as an equal heir with me to the family business, is no slouch, but our family’s wealth is nothing compared to Jared Macalister’s.

For the first time since this started, I got nervous. You see, my reason for hunting down this Jared from Tessa’s past was because he was the one who got away. A little known fact that I had uncovered is that Tessa was once engaged to Jared. There was no mention of what went down anywhere, but apparently, he was the one who broke off the engagement.

I was still piecing it all together when his true identity was revealed, putting a crimp in my sails. There’s no way that Jared Macalister is going to go along with my plan, and now that I think of it, it seemed so juvenile. Still, I’ve never been a quitter, and this was too important. The future of my nieces and the only sister in law I’ll ever acknowledge was at stake. So, Jared Macalister was just going to have to hear me out.

I stressed for weeks over my approach. Had this moron been anyone, I could just use my skills and wiles on him, just approach him like any smo on the street, but not this guy. This guy probably had security details, ten men, deep everywhere he went.

Then I thought, if I were doing this for me or to get close to him for some stupid girly reason, I’d balk, but this wasn’t about me getting with the high and mighty Jared Macalister, but three people whom I love dearly; besides, there’s nothing to lose. So I emailed him some cryptic shit and held my breath.

“Tomorrow at nine, my office, I’ll send you the address.” At first, I thought the response was from one of his minions, so I checked and double-checked. I’d done some research and found out that he likes hearing from the common people and is known for actually getting back to them but let’s get real, even my dad has an assistant.

I spent the rest of that day nervous as all hell. I kept going back to the few grainy black and white photos of him, wondering how the heck this guy has kept his identity so well hidden all these years. I was tempted to call and ask Deidre what she knew about Tessa’s time with him, but that would’ve given too much away, so I didn’t.

All I could piece together was the fact that they’d dated for a while in college, had gotten engaged, and then he called it off. I only know that he had been the one to call it off because one of Tessa’s friends had commented to her about it on the book of faces before she erased everything about the two of them and their relationship.

Because of what he was, I wasn’t expecting much. My ilk, the computer nerd type, isn’t exactly the most fashion-conscious among the living, and we tend to see our appearance as little more than an extension of ourselves and not the sole focus of who we are. In other words, we tend to come in the homely variety more so than anything else, or at least that’s what society expects of us.