"Sorry. I just needed some time." We stepped out of the hall, down the steps to the lawn. It was sprinkled with dead leaves from the trees, which gave the place an eerie beauty.
"You can have all the time you need, but don't make me send a search party after you."
"It isn't that bad. Not yet."
"No pressure, okay? No one's rushing you back to work. Take as long as you need." In my mind, that meant the number of days I had left ‘til I died. I had never been particularly excited about work, but now, I wanted to be as far away from it as possible. Thinking about work made me think about my dad, and thinking about him made me remember that thinking was all I'd be able to do from now on. He was gone. The worst of the grief, the screaming and the tears, had passed. Now I went between feelings of anger, self-pity, and numbness over and over in a dark, never-ending cycle.
"What happens now?" I asked, shoving my hands in the pockets of my trench against the wind.
"Until you're ready to come back to work, nothing," he said firmly. "We can talk about it later. The company isn't going anywhere." Well shit, someone who cared more about me than making money. Brett was one of the good ones, one of the few I put up there with my parents. He lived well and had a sizable fortune to his name, but it hadn't made him a robot. He had values and his eye on what the fuck actually mattered at the end of the day.
"If that’s the case, it was nice knowing you, friend," I said. He patted my back.
"Use this time to think," he said. "We aren't on a schedule, but we need you at one hundred percent when you come back." I thanked him and told him I understood. I didn't think I'd be calling him to talk it out; it wasn't really my style, but it meant a lot to know that if I needed to, I could. If I needed to shave my head and have a breakdown, I could, but after, I needed to get back to reality. He walked back inside without me, but that was fine. I wanted a break from the constant stream of well-wishers. There were almost no people on the lawn, and the cold air against my face actually felt kind of good.
"Cameron?" I heard behind me. Shit, so much for that. I turned, seeing a woman in a knee length skirt and black coat coming up to me. I relaxed seeing it was her, the lawyer; what was her name? Right, Natalie. Her blond hair tumbled down over her shoulders and chest. It was gold, like the color of spun sugar. I had never seen her with her hair down. This was the first time I had seen her outside of work at all, I realized. Was it just that we weren't under the fluorescent office lights that I thought she looked so different, or had I just never really ever looked at her?
"Cameron, hi," she started, "it’s Natalie, Natalie Cooke, from work? Legal." I nodded. I knew who she was; she didn't have to tell me. We hadn't had an opportunity to work together before, but I had noticed her. Dad had mentioned her name a lot, Brett too, but we hadn't really talked. Maybe a couple words in passing but nothing substantial. Her lips and cheeks were pink, the latter probably from the cold. The heels she had on gave her at least a three-inch lift. She was probably average height with them off. Her eyes were blue, wide, and attentive, and her mouth was full, with naturally pouty lips. She was pretty. Oh yeah, I thought, looking her up and down. I had definitely noticed her.
From the times she had averted her eyes when we passed each other in the hallway and how stubbornly she had avoided small talk on the elevator rides we had taken together, I was going to guess that she didn't particularly care for me. I would have thought maybe she just wasn't the chattiest person, but I knew the general sentiment around the office when it came to me. I was the next in line, the person who would take Grayson from them. The person who didn't really deserve what he was getting. Nobody ever said
anything to my face, but they didn't have to. It was clear in what they would say to me.
"Thank you for coming," I said, giving her the canned response everyone else I had had to talk to so far had gotten.
"I'm sorry for your loss," she said. I nodded, giving her a weak smile. "I was with Brett when I heard the news."
"It was a shock," I said lamely. I didn't know why anyone thought I wanted to hear about where they had been when it had happened. Maybe they are just trying to start sucking up early, I thought. Sure, get in good with the new boss as soon as possible, even at his parents’ funeral. To hell with common decency.
"I can't imagine."
"I'm sure my father would have appreciated your concern."
"You're probably tired as hell of everybody telling you that," she said.
"I can't exactly ask them to stop. Even if I am tired of hearing it, it's still true." She nodded and looked down at the ground before looking up at me again.
"I don't know a lot of other companies that would let their employees pay their respects like this." Usually, people stopped after they told me how sorry they were for me. I didn't know why she was still talking. Ha, the first real conversation we had ever had, and all it had taken had been my father's death to get the ball rolling.
"It's what my father would have wanted."
"I'd really like to talk when you have the time."
"Talk?" I asked. Of course, talk, I realized, answering my own question. We had nothing in common but the company we both worked for—the company I had forcibly become the head of four days ago. She wanted to talk work. Of course, she does; you weren't getting hopeful there, were you? Fucking typical. Why had I let myself think she'd surprise me?
"When you're ready. Nothing set in stone, of course not now." Not now? Why not? We were both free. My dad was still going to be dead whenever we got around to this talk, so why not just get it out of the way?
"Sounds good," I said tersely. She nodded and smiled, oblivious to my annoyance, or maybe pleased by it. Hadn't seen her do that before either. She told me one more time how sorry she was, then walked away. I watched her leave and head back up the stairs to the hall. How inappropriate was it to notice how beautiful she was at my parents’ funeral? Not as inappropriate as it would have been if I had followed her and tried to get her number. If our first conversation could have been different, maybe. I watched as she disappeared among the other black-clad mourners in the hall. In another world where I wasn’t me, and this hadn’t happened, yeah, maybe. Maybe I would have gone after her.
Chapter Six
Natalie
He hates me. He has to hate me, I thought darkly, walking away from him, up the stairs, back into the funeral home. You could have waited, bitch. ‘Til when? ‘Til the bodies were in the ground? What a world of difference that would have made. It had to be said, I thought to myself. Some people don't have the luxury to crumble when disaster strikes, as sad as that is. He was one of those people. Since he was, he probably knew that or gotten the run-down from his dad or something in the past, I didn’t know. I clearly had no idea how these people's lives worked. In their world, wealth was passed down, and you lived knowing the death of your parents meant an inheritance. That had to fuck a person up. Didn't it go sideways sometimes? Wasn't that why the Menendez brothers had ended up killing their parents?
Grayson and Evangeline Porter hadn't been killed. Okay, they had, but not in the malicious, calculated, murder way. In the tragic, freak accident way. Remembering the anticipation I had heard in Grayson's voice as he talked about getting to spend some vacation time with his wife made me feel a little sick. I couldn't imagine. I could never be the one. My parents weren't known on the scale that the Porters were, but losing them in one fell swoop and then days later being expected to appear at their funeral, I would have lost it. Whoever thought they would be able to get me to do it would have had to come get me from my bed, where I would have gladly spent the next six months bawling my eyes out.
Nobody's ready when their parents die, I thought, but this is a special kind of tragedy. I saw Brett inside and walked up to him. He finished the conversation he was having then turned to me once the person was gone.