No wonder he’d seemed so hard at work for the last two weeks, even though he didn’t have to report for work in Guadalajara.
A scroll through his bio makes no reference to his royal title, but it does mention that he used to be the company’s Chief Medical Officer and even completed a year of fieldwork in a St. Louis hospital before taking on his current role.
A follow-up Wikipedia search informs me that DBCare used to be just DrosselCare and its biggest competitor was Bylund Holdings, a Swedish healthcare corporation. But sometime around the late aughts, the two companies started going through the multi-year process of combining their forces. Supposedly to be able to offer their clients more in the way of health solutions.
But I’m reading between a lot of lines as I do my research. And from what I’m figuring, DrosselCare joined forces with Bylund Holdings, so that they could acquire even more pharmacies and clinics in the much less regulated United States than they could in Europe. Aleksander’s and Ingrid’s marriage should have been the jewel in the two families’ new conglomerate crown.
But then I came along.
Do you know what I gave up to be with you?
That question had seemed so hyperbolic when he’d been taking me roughly in the back house. But further research using Aleksander Drossel’s real name reveals all sorts of German language gossip nuggets, which I read with the help of GoogleTranslate.
Apparently, Prince really was one of his names. His father, who would have been the Crown Prince of Drosselholz if their line had been allowed to continue, had married a woman by the name of Gwendolyn Prince, the daughter of a Welsh business magnate. And Rhys hadn’t been lying about what a good cook she was. She actually had a few cooking shows, including one that sounded like a German-language version of the Great British Bake Off.
Not surprisingly, since their mother was so busy, all three of the Drosselholz children had been sent off to boarding school in England which accounted for Rhys’s accent. From what I could see, Rhys’s younger sister and brother had received most of the online press, with Alek often being reduced to a line about how he had made the rather boring choice of becoming a doctor and going to work for DBCare.
Most of the articles I found about him involved his split from Ingrid, who like his mother, was the daughter of a wealthy businessman. The breakup had come right around the time when the final merger papers were supposed to be signed after the two families had been operating together in good faith for years. Quite a few business papers wondered if the deal would even go through. And other less reputable sources wondered if Aleksander’s father would allow him to continue on with the stateside version of the company. Apparently, Aleksander was estranged from his family for a few months after calling off the wedding.
Reading all those scandalized articles, a new question breaks through my daze of anger.
Why? Why did he throw away his future as the prince of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate for me?
A knock sounds on the door, interrupting any possible conclusion I could have drawn.
“Yes, A?” I call out. It’s easy to distinguish the twins’ knocks. Unfortunately, I think pretty much every geeky boy who grew up watching Big Bang Theory thinks frenetic knocking is the best way to get someone to answer the door. Thanks for that, Sheldon.
A opens the door. “Can you come out here?” he asks, his eyes wide with panic. “Sis is acting crazy!”
“What are you doing?” I find E throwing clothes into a suitcase after following A into her room.
“Packing!” she answers. Her chest is heaving like packing is some kind of cardio.
But it’s not exertion that has her breathing hard, I surmise with a quick diagnosis. She’s angry. After years of watching her lose roles to less talented actresses because the former head of the Thespian club couldn’t envision a brown girl in a traditionally White role, I recognized this routine. She was angry, but she had trouble expressing her anger. So she packed all that anger into action, huffing and puffing around until it faded and she could go on with her life.
Most often she cleaned. Usually just her room. But last year, when a much-less talented cheerleader named Clara Reynolds was cast as Sandy in Grease, simply because she looked, as the former Thespian director put it, “more believable” in the part, E had cleaned the entire house from top to bottom.
However, now she’s packing. I glance down at the suitcase then back up at her, “Where do you think you’re going exactly?”
“Pittsburgh!” she answers.
I find myself shaking my head again for the second time that day. “Carnegie Mellon doesn’t start until the fall,” I remind her.