The platinum ring on my pinky finger felt like a lead weight.
I stared at it, watching as it reflected off the shifting sunlight that poured in through the car’s window. Olivia had given it back in the five seconds of solitude we’d had on the flight back to San Francisco, insisting that it wasn’t something she felt right about keeping.
That was fair. If this was real, if we were in a relationship and had gotten married the proper way, I would have bought her something far more flashy.
It was probably for the best that she hadn’t come to the bar that night. I’d texted her twice in the hopes that maybe she’d come through the doors of the Parasol Down in the Wynn and I’d get another night with her, but no. Giving myself extra time to try to crack that safe wouldn’t have gone down well for either of us.
I still found myself dreaming, night and day, of her — replaying every moment that wasn’t too clouded in fog from the whiskey and rum I’d filled myself with all night. It must have just been because I’d failed in my conquest. My interest in every other woman I’d found myself fawning over, throwing myself in front of at my discretion, had faded the moment after I’d got what I wanted from them. But with her, even though I’d come close, even though I’d spent the entire night devouring her in every way she let me, I hadn’t felt a single bit relieved from my want of her.
The car door opened to my left and Ethan slid into the back seat next to me, pushing his glasses up his nose as he clicked the seatbelt into place. “You do realize I have a car and I’m completely capable of driving myself to work.”
“I wanted to speak to you personally before we get to the office,” I said, leaning forward to lift the divider between my driver, Paul, and us in the back.
He eyed me warily as he shut the door. “About your marriage?”
“About my annulment,” I clarified. I crossed my hands in my lap, hiding the ring from my line of sight as the car started heading toward the office.
“I don’t really dabble in family law.” He placed his briefcase in the empty space between us, flicking open the clasps. “I suppose I’ll need to do some research, though, since I’ve got another reason to look into it.”
“Another reason—?”
A stack of papers slammed down onto my lap. “Before we even begin to discuss the annulment, you need to know what else is going on.”
Looking down at the top sheet of the stapled-together bunch, Chapter 11 Bankruptcy was written in bold at the top. “The fuck is this?” I asked. “We’re doing fine.”
“Not you,” Ethan hissed, reaching over me to point to the line just beneath the title. “Three of the companies you absorbed last week and another that Blackwood already held. They sold to you knowing this would happen.”
Fuck.
“You’ve just spent millions acquiring thin air.”
“Yeah, I fucking understand,” I snapped. “What does this mean for me?”
“They’ve restructured entirely, naming Blackwood as the portion of their company that will be paying the debt,” Ethan sighed, flipping another couple of pages in my lap. My stomach sank, and although I wasn’t one for motion sickness, I worried I might paint the back of Paul’s seat with my breakfast. “So far, with all of them together, we’re looking at… two hundred million dollars of debt to be repaid, if the courts agree to their restructuring plan.”
“So we’re taking four companies to court is what you’re saying,” I sighed. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to internalize the problem, thinking through each possibility. We could afford the hit, of course, but it would stall numerous projects and shift our wind farm setup to next year. I didn’t even want to consider how much I’d offered to the research team at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology for the rights to the water purification system that Olivia had brought to me.
“Yes, and potentially others. I worry that there may be a few more hiding in the background that haven’t filed just yet. They seem to have been in… cahoots,” Ethan explained. “It’s going to take some time to figure this out. And this isn’t even the most pressing thing.”
Raising one eyebrow at him, a lash of pain whipped through my skull from the stress. “What does that mean?”
He slid the top stack of papers off my lap and set it back into the briefcase before motioning toward the remaining thick bundle left in my possession. “You wanted to know my other reason for looking into family law.”
Sighing, I looked down at the papers, my stomach still churning from what he’d already told me.
Custody Modification stood out in big, bold letters at the very top, followed by legal jargon about the State of California and Mr. Damien Blackwood.
What the fuck was this?
My mind began racing. Someone I’d slept with, maybe, wanted a stab at the money I harbored. Someone I’d dated, maybe, wanted to tear me down a peg with a ludicrous claim. Or worse, someone so bored and full of themselves, wanted to claim I owned a goldfish with them and cash in on goldfish support payments.
Carefully lifting the first page with shaking fingers, I looked to the second, finding a litany of words I wasn’t even sure I could wrap my mind around. I swallowed, my throat suddenly going dry when a single name stood out to me — Marissa Thompson.
Stomach acid filled the back of my throat. I covered my mouth with my hand and dropped the paper, focusing my attention instead on the passing world outside as we neared the campus. “What is this?” I croaked.
“You have a son,” Ethan said, his words slipping out as if they were so common, so casual. I glanced at him, hoping I’d find a smirk on his face and a laugh bit back behind his teeth, but all I found was a cold, hard stare. “Marissa passed away. She named you as her preferred legal guardian for Noah in her will.”
Marissa passed away.
Noah. Noah Thompson-Blackwood. Noah. Noah. Noah.
What the fuck was happening?
Marissa, my ex, hadn’t spoken to me in five years. Surely, she would have told me if I had a son. Surely, I’d have been notified, been there for the birth, co-parented with her, or worse, stayed with her. There wasn’t a world, in my mind, where she would have kept this from me. We didn’t end well, but it wasn’t so bad that she’d cut me out entirely — right?
“I need to call her,” I breathed.
“Well, you can’t, ‘cause she’s dead.”
I blinked at him. Somehow that little nugget of information had gone in one ear, swirled around, and right back out my other. “She’s dead?”
“I just said that. Twice, actually,” Ethan said, slipping the stack from my lap and flicking through the paperwork. “Cancer, apparently. Happened last week. She had time to get all of this set up.”
Marissa… was dead.
“Dead dead?”
“Christ, Damien, yes. Cold as ice. Six feet underground—… no, wait, she was cremated. Scattered over the Pacific by her sister, then, probably,” he deadpanned.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around this. I’d spent two years with her, considered marriage with her, spent God knows how much on an engagement ring — she was the first and only person I’d ever thought I could settle down with.
Stuffing down the suffocating thought that I’d never felt as drawn to Marissa as I did to my actual wife, I swallowed. We’d broken up due to her brief infidelity, and I needed to focus on that. “We can’t be sure the kid is mine,” I challenged. “There was someone else involved at the end.”
“I’m aware. I’ve ordered a paternity test in the meantime, but supposedly, Noah looks like a copy of you. Just… smaller, obviously,” Ethan said.
“What do I need to do?”
“You’ll attend the appointment I’ve arranged for tomorrow to submit your DNA. It’s just a simple mouth swab. And you’ll need to prepare for his arrival in two weeks.” He shoved the stack of papers back into his briefcase and locked it as we pulled into the parking lot of Blackwood Energy Solutions. “Marissa’s sister will be taking care of him in the interim, so for now, focus your attention on figuring out how to be a father to a five-year-old while I sort out the annulment.”
