My secretary poked her head into my office, looking pale and terrified. I scowled at her. “I have my 'do not disturb' on for a reason,” I snarled. “Get out!”
“Sir, it's your sister,” the woman said, barely audible. “She told me to interrupt you, whatever you were doing. Said it was an emergency.”
I felt my blood run cold at the thought of anything having happened to Katherine. She was the only person who I could ever trust, the only person who had proved time and time again that my love for her wasn't unfounded. I hurriedly clicked off the “do not disturb” on my phone and nodded to my secretary to patch the call through.
When I picked it up, I felt stupid for even thinking that something might have happened to Katherine. No, she was just as all right as ever, but she was angry. It was the first time I thought I
'd ever heard her truly angry about something, despite all the times that I'd missed our brunches or forgotten to call her when I'd said that I would.
“Andrew Patrick Goldwright!” she snapped. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! I know that you have no manners, and I know that you're a misogynistic asshole, but seriously? I never thought that you would be this much of a dick. An absolute dick. What the fuck is your problem? Where the hell do you get off?”
I pulled the receiver away from my ear and stared at it, wondering if this was really my sweet, good-natured sister on the other end of the line. I'd hardly heard her cuss before, let alone cuss like this.
She continued to rant for another minute or so, and I just sat there listening, letting her work it out of her system. It was a tactic that I usually employed with other businessmen when they called irate about some product not being delivered or some other failure in our system. But when it was upset businessmen that I was working with, rants like this tended to bore me. When it was Katherine ranting like this, and ranting at me, I started to get agitated.
“Are you going to tell me what you're so upset about?” I asked when she finally wrapped up what she was saying. I tried to keep my tone mild, but I didn't quite manage to. Instead, I sounded almost embarrassed, and I didn't even know what I had supposedly done wrong. It was something big, though, from the sounds of it.
“I can't believe you,” Katherine said. She sounded disgusted still, but much more like her usual self. “Do you even realize how badly you've upset Lexi?”
I felt a pang of guilt, but I tried to remind myself that none of this was my fault. I had all the evidence. Katherine just didn't know the full story.
I tried to laugh it off. “That's actually a pretty smart move, her coming to you for her next play,” I said, as though I were nonchalantly discussing a chess game rather than the object of my romantic affections, who had turned out to be a con. “I guess she thinks that if she can get you on her side, this whole thing will blow over.”
“I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but you're wrong, whatever it is,” Katherine said succinctly. “I came over to your place to surprise Lexi and Emma with tickets to a show for the afternoon. I found Lexi distraught and packing her bags while Emma sat in the kitchen with Janice. When I asked what was going on, Lexi told me that you wanted them to leave and that you didn't believe that Emma was your daughter. I thought we'd been over that already.”
“Renée cornered me after work yesterday,” I told Katherine.
Katherine groaned. “Don't tell me you've decided to get back together with that bimbo? So you've sent Lexi packing? Do you have no conscience? You've just spent the past few months cozying up to Lexi, and now you're done with her, just like that?”
I tapped a pen against a stack of papers at the side of my desk. “Renée hired a private investigator to dig into Lexi's background,” I told my sister. “Lexi apparently has a criminal record that I didn't know about. For fraud.” I threw the pen across the room. “How could I have been so stupid? I didn't even bother to look into her background. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I just went along with everything that she was saying.”
“Did you ask her about the conviction?” Katherine asked, sounding surprised. “Maybe there was a good reason behind it. I mean, not that there's ever a good reason for committing fraud, but if she was trying to, I don't know, help Emma and she thought that that was the only way to do it, then at least it would make sense.”
“This was before Emma came along,” I said grimly. “And that's not the whole story. Renée also got the guy to do a paternity test. Emma isn't mine. Lexi was conning me all along.”
Katherine was silent for a moment, and then she started laughing. “Seriously, Andrew?” she asked, sounding as though she was beside herself.
“Katherine, it's not funny,” I snapped. “I have enough people trying to weasel me out of millions. It was a great scheme, I suppose, but the jig's up now. It's over. And although I didn't tell her to pack her bags, I'm glad that she realizes that it's over and is going to get out of there. I'm staying in a hotel for the meantime.”
“Andy, you idiot,” Katherine said, her voice gone soft. “Forget your feelings for a moment. Think of this as though it were a business deal. If one of Orinoco's competitors showed up at your office and offered you information on a company that you were interested in acquiring, telling you that that company was crap and that you were wasting your time, you'd question their information and their motives, wouldn't you?”
“Of course I would,” I snapped.
“Even if it was legal-looking, all nicely typed-up with tables and graphs,” Katherine said.
“What are you getting at?” I asked.
“That's exactly what Renée did,” Katherine said. “She came to your work with the goal of convincing you that her rival wasn't worth your time. But you're so worried about things not working out with Lexi that you started to wonder if maybe Renée's information was right.”
“Lexi and Renée aren't rivals,” I said firmly. “And Renée knows that. She said that she respects that we aren't in a relationship anymore and that we are never getting back together. She said so, in as many words. Your whole argument is invalid.”
“Of course, Renée was going to say that,” Katherine said gently. “Because she couldn't very well say that she was there to try to win you back, could she? You would never have listened to her if she had put it that way.”
“She said she was just trying to look out for me because we'd been friends long before we started dating one another,” I said. “Friends do that sort of thing, looking out for one another.” I knew saying this out loud, made me sound stupid, but at the time I had believed her.
Katherine laughed again. “I don't know what's funnier, you calling Renée a friend, or your insistence that she was just looking out for you. She managed to destroy your relationship, the thing that made you the happiest that I've ever seen you, all in one night. And the two of you were never friends.”
“We've known each other for a long time,” I maintained stubbornly.