Married To The Devil CEO

"Say that again," my father said, "because I don't think I heard you right."

I stood in the doorway of his office, my hand still on the frame, watching the color drain out of his face. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the man across his desk, a lawyer named Grant Dawson with a briefcase full of papers that had turned my father's thirty years of work into a pile of debt overnight.

"The Kensington contract has been voided, Mr. Hart," Dawson said, not unkindly, but not gently either. "Structural violations were found in the foundation work on three sites. The city has issued stop-work orders on all of them. Given the penalty clauses, and the loans you took out against future contracts…"

"I know what I signed," my father snapped. "I built that company with my own hands. I checked every foundation myself."

"According to the inspection reports, you didn't."

I didn't understand yet what that meant. Not really. I understood the shape of it … bad news, big numbers, my father's jaw tight enough to crack … but not the weight. That came later, once Dawson left and my father sat very still behind his desk for almost ten minutes without saying a word.

"Dad?"

He looked up like he'd forgotten I was there.

"Amelia." He tried to smile. It didn't work. "This isn't something you need to hear."

"What happened?"

"Nothing you need to worry about."

I was twenty-four, not eight, and something in me refused to be handed that line. "Dad. What happened?"

He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, and for the first time in my life, I saw my father look old. Not tired … old. Like something inside him had quietly given out.

"Someone sabotaged us," he said finally. "The inspection reports say things I know aren't true. Reinforcement steel that was never installed. Foundations poured wrong. I was there, Amelia. I checked that work myself."

"Then tell them that."

"I did. Doesn't matter. The reports are official. The city believes the reports." He laughed, and it was an awful sound, thin and humorless. "Thirty years, and it comes down to paperwork I never touched."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and we sat in the wreck of his office while the light outside went orange and then gray.

By the time we got home, my mother already knew. I don't know how … maybe she'd called the office, maybe she just knew my father well enough to read it in his silence over the phone … but she was standing in the kitchen with her hands pressed flat against the counter, like she needed something solid to hold onto.

"How bad?" she asked, before either of us had taken off our coats.

"Bad," my father said.

"How bad, David?"

He told her. I watched her face while he did it … the mortgage on the house, used as collateral for the company loans years ago when business was slow. The penalty clauses for breach of contract on three separate sites. The bank already calling. A number that didn't sound real to me, the kind of number you hear in the news about someone else's disaster.

My mother didn't cry. She's never been a crier, not in front of us. She just went very quiet, the way she does when she's holding something in so tightly it might crack her ribs.

"We'll figure it out," she said.

"With what?" My father's voice cracked on the second word. "Evelyn, we have nothing left to figure it out with."

"We have each other. We have the kids."

"The kids can't pay off half a million dollars."

I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, and neither of them looked at me, and I understood, without anyone saying it out loud, that the weight of this was going to land on all of us, whether we were ready or not.

Noah came home an hour later, still in his work uniform, smelling like the diner where he waited tables between classes. He took one look at our parents' faces and dropped his bag by the door.

"What."

"Sit down," my mother said.

"I don't want to sit down, tell me what's wrong."

She told him. I watched my little brother's face do the same thing mine must have done … confusion, then disbelief, then the slow, sick understanding that this wasn't the kind of problem you could argue your way out of.

"Someone did this on purpose?" he said. "Sabotaged Dad's inspections?"

"That's what it looks like," my father said.

"Then find out who. Sue them. Something…"

"With what money, Noah?" My father's voice rose for the first time all evening, sharp enough that Noah flinched. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just … I don't know what to do."

I had never heard my father say those words before. Not once, in twenty-four years. He was the man who fixed things, who showed up to every disaster with a plan and a toolbox, who used to tell me that there wasn't a problem in the world that couldn't be solved if you were willing to work hard enough at it.

He looked, sitting at our kitchen table with his hands shaking around a cup of coffee he wasn't drinking, like a man who had run out of hard work to give.

That night I lay awake doing math I had no business doing, running numbers that didn't add up no matter how I arranged them. My savings. Noah's. What we could sell. None of it came close. None of it would even scratch the surface of what my father owed.

I didn't sleep much. Somewhere around three in the morning, I heard my mother crying quietly in their room … the first time in my life I'd ever heard that sound … and I lay there in the dark with my chest aching, wondering how a company built over thirty years, brick by brick, inspection by inspection, could be destroyed in a single afternoon by paperwork none of us had ever seen.

I didn't know yet that someone had wanted it destroyed. That the sabotage wasn't random, and wasn't finished, and that in exactly six days a stranger's lawyer would knock on our door with an offer so strange, so impossible, that it would change every single thing about my life … starting with my name.

"There's a man at the door," Noah said, "and he's got a briefcase that probably costs more than Dad's truck."

I came downstairs still drying my hands on a dish towel, and I saw him through the front window before I saw his face properly … a tall man in a charcoal suit, standing on our cracked front porch like he'd never touched concrete that wasn't freshly poured. He held himself the way rich people do, like the world owed him a certain amount of patience and he intended to collect.

My father opened the door before I could stop him.

"Mr. Hart," the man said. "My name is Preston Wade. I'm here on behalf of Lucien Blackwood."

My father's face did something complicated. Blackwood Enterprises had swallowed two of our smaller competitors last year. Everyone in the construction business knew that name, and nobody said it without a little bit of fear in their voice.

"I don't have anything to say to Blackwood," my father said.