"My job is helping you do yours." I nodded. "You do what you need to do. Taking some time away is going to help, but it isn't going to decide the fate of Porter Holdings."
"I know that. Thanks for getting it. I'll figure it out. I just can’t right now, not like this."
"If you decide to come down out of your cave, you know where to find me," he said with a smile. He offered to help again, but I told him not to bother. I'd have to get used to the heavy lifting. He asked for the address, and I gave him the directions my realtor had given me, even though I thought he’d probably never use them. After he left, I heaved the last of the boxes onto my truck then went back to the house for one last check to make sure I didn't leave behind anything I needed. Flashlight and batteries, basic tools, first aid kit in case of emergencies. Anything else I'd figure out when I got out there.
I started my trip, taking the two hours it took to get to the mountains fast. The city disappeared, and the looming mountain range got bigger, closer. The trees started outnumbering buildings, and the mountains rose on either side of the road. Traffic slowed, and for stretches, mine was the only car on the road. I had to slow down significantly turning off the asphalt. The road was bumpy. I didn't want to rattle anything off the back. It wound through arid grassland, spotted with trees. Only one car drove past me there.
Snowfall had already begun, and it was significantly colder than it had been in the valley; I felt it even though the car was all sealed up. The elevation was gradual enough to not feel like a climb but dragged on forever at the speed I had to use. I saw a few other cabins on the way there, but according to the realtor, the closest one to me was two miles away. I liked the sound of that.
I went right at a fork, and the tree cover increased with all aspens and firs on either side of the road. It got a little harder to negotiate too, steeper and narrow enough to hardly fit a second car alongside mine. I was barely moving at a crawl, trying to get over it without losing anything. It was annoying, but anyone who wanted to come up here after me would have to deal with that. I was betting that that would mean few to zero visitors.
The road turned into the driveway, and I saw it. First cabin on the left after the fork, the realtor had said. It was surrounded by trees and built on about a four-foot elevation from the ground with a stone and wooden stilt base. Grass poked through the carpet of fluffy white snow, and light cover frosted the trees. There was a wooden table with two chairs on the large porch. It was all wood. I parked my truck and got out. The air was frigid; I felt it through my leather jacket and sweater. There was a fireplace, so that sounded like a good first order of business. I turned, looking out around the house. Trees and snowy peaks were all I saw. No noise, cars, or people; it all washed over me at once. It was just me, finally. Welcome home, I thought, and made my way to the house.
Chapter Ten
Natalie
There was a knock at my door. I looked up from my computer as it opened, and Brett poked his head inside.
"Natalie?"
"Good morning Mr. Hamm," I said.
"Morning," he said, walking in with his hands in his pockets. "Busy?"
"What do you need?" I asked. It had been about half an hour since I had gotten to the office. After the drama and the past couple weeks with Cameron, Brett's visits to my office had had something to do with him. He might have disappeared into the mountains, but he wasn't gone.
The rumors around the office swirled like tornadoes, and the truth was that it didn’t matter where he was—the mountains two hours out of the city or the fucking moon—because he was supposed to be here. Brett was a capable leader, more than Cameron seemed to be if you asked me, but I was keeping that opinion to myself. It didn't matter so much who was better because Cameron was it. He plainly didn't have a choice in the matter. It wasn't fair, but it was what it was.
"You haven't heard anything from Cameron, have you?" he asked.
"Nothing since we talked last week. Has something happened?"
"Something is about to," he said, taking a deep breath. "There's a meeting starting in about ten minutes upstairs. Stockholders. I wanted you there in case any of them wanted to discuss legal."
"Oh, of course," I said, standing.
"This is going to be the first stockholder meeting since the accident. I've been pushing it back because of the situation with Cameron."
"It's going to look bad that he isn't present," I commented.
"Not being present is one thing. Disappearing off the map after making massive property sales is another thing entirely. They're going to have questions, and if we don't have answers, they'll come up with their own."
"How would they know all that?"
"The deaths of his parents shot him into the public eye. It's never been a secret that he was next in line to take over Porter Holdings. People in the industry have known as long as he has, and they noticed when he disappeared." God, Cameron. What are you doing? I didn't understand why he acted how he did, but with this, I could imagine how stressful it would be having people breathing down your neck so soon after a tragedy.
In reality, expecting something to happen doesn’t always mean it’s going to be easy when it does. He could have known all his life that he would be replacing his dad, but now that it was real, he was finding out the hard way that knowing that it would happen hadn’t really made him ready for it. I didn't think he was handling this the best way, but it didn't matter what I thought. It should have only mattered what he thought, but at the moment, the impatient stockholders upstairs didn’t give two shits about his feelings.
He was in trouble; that was what I was hearing. I had been more concerned about the scores of people on the lower end of the business that would suffer because of Cameron playing truant than the people up there at the top with him, but maybe I should have brought it up with him when we had had lunch the other day. Maybe he would have cared when the people he w
as screwing over were as rich and powerful as he was.
I went up to the top floor with Brett. I had never sat in on a stockholder meeting at Porter Holdings before. Mr. Porter had tended to look for legal advice if he ever needed it before or after the meetings, not during. We went to a conference room where four men were already seated, talking amongst themselves. They kept quiet when Brett and I walked in. Large leather chairs surrounded a long, black conference table. He introduced me as we sat, him at the head and me on the chair to his left. I had never met any of the men before, but they were all middle-aged. Brett tried to run through introductions before they started.
"Are we really wasting more time on introductions after starting late?" one man asked. He was in a slate gray suit, and his hair had thinned to almost nothing. Mr. Granger; I had caught his name before he had interrupted Brett.
"We thought you were leaving to get the boy," another said. Black suit and blue tie. Copious facial hair and a faint foreign accent.