8. Declan

8

DECLAN

I stared at the numbers on the screen. I’d gone over them a thousand times, but a thousand and one wouldn’t hurt. This was potentially the most critical meeting I’d ever have in my life. I needed to project confidence, competence, and cohesiveness in all three branches of the business: Wolfe Hotels and Resorts, Wolfe Tequila, and Wolfe Clothing. The trustees had to believe that my transition into my grandfather’s role was seamless and that their investments and stocks were in good hands. If not, the company could take serious losses.

As I scanned the projections for the third and fourth quarters again, a bubble popped up in the top right corner from Hannah that read: Mrs. Wolfe incoming.

I wondered, after Serena and I got married, if she would take my name and there would be another Mrs. Wolfe. Derek’s wife Raquel had decided to keep her last name, so she wasn’t a Wolfe. Serena and I hadn’t discussed that. I wondered why it hadn’t come up in the seven years we’d been together.

Speaking of Serena, I pulled out my phone to see if she’d responded to one of the three texts I’d sent her this morning. She hadn’t. For the past two weeks, I’d been trying to pin my fiancée down for dinner. She kept postponing. If I were a paranoid man, I would swear she was avoiding me. Every night, she’d had an event suddenly come up, or a photo shoot, or a dinner with her agent—something that kept her away until after I was already in bed. The only time I’d seen her was in the morning when I got up, and she was still asleep. In four days, I would be leaving for six months. The plan was for her to join me in two weeks, but I wanted to speak to her before I got on the plane to Japan.

I stood and was halfway to the office door when it opened. Gran walked in with the air of class, grace, and sophistication that I’d always admired in her. Even at ninety-two, she commanded attention in any room she entered.

Today she wore black pinstripe trousers. A crisp white button-down t-shirt with oversized cuffs and collar, a red handbag, red flats, and a red lip completed her fashion-forward look. Her jewelry was a combination of gold and silver. I’d noticed since my grandfather passed that she’d been more daring in her clothing, makeup, and jewelry. Not anything crazy, just a little more of her own personal style was shining through.

I wondered how much of herself she’d dimmed to be Mrs. Dexter Xavier Wolfe. While he was alive, I hadn’t given it much thought. He was a man who took up so much space—so much air. His presence clouded things, and now I felt like I was seeing them much more clearly.

“Hello, Gran. You look beautiful.” I leaned down and kissed her cheek.

“Yes, I know, dear.” She patted my arm before lowering herself onto a chair facing my desk.

“I didn’t see your brother or Raquel on my way in.”

“I haven’t seen or heard from either one of them since Grandad’s funeral.”

Her lips pursed. She dealt more closely with Raquel than I ever had, and I wondered if she had more insight into what was going on.

“Have you heard from either of them?” I asked.

“No. I haven’t.”

“They know the meeting is today,” I stated.

“Yes. They do,” she agreed.

In my family, there were a lot of things that were left unsaid. In fact, we rarely talked about anything. We never talked about my father’s addictions or my brother’s drinking and drug use. We never talked about the rampant infidelity in my family. My brother cheated. My father cheated. My grandfather cheated. Yet they all claimed to love their wives. In fact, the reason my father said he cheated was because he loved my mom so much that he couldn’t handle her being sick, so he cheated to take away the pain. My grandfather claimed he loved my grandmother so much that he didn’t tell her that he cheated. And my brother claimed that even though he cheated, the fact that he was married proved how much he loved his wife, like she’d won some prize being the woman he chose to be with.

What kind of love was that?

We never talked about my mother’s cancer diagnosis or her dying from complications of pneumonia when I was six. We never talked about my father leaving his children at home to care for her while he spent weekends with his mistresses. Or the fact that my father, their son, died at age twenty-eight when he hit a tree going ninety miles an hour—he was three times over the legal limit.

“How is Serena?” my grandmother asked.

“Fine.”

“You two excited about the wedding?”

Gran had always had a sixth sense with people. She knew if something was bothering someone or if they were hiding something. Everyone else in my life said that I was hard to read, impossible even. Not Gran. She somehow saw right through me.

“We’ve been busy. I’ve had a lot on my plate. I haven’t really thought about it.”

And honestly, the only reason I was getting married was because it was expected of me. My grandfather had always drilled it into both my brother and me that it was our duty, as if we were royalty or something. We were the heirs to the Wolfe throne. Family and legacy had always been the most important things to him. He’d been the one who had pushed for me to settle down. He’d introduced me to Serena. She was the daughter of a man he knew nearly his entire life. She was smart and beautiful; she came from money, so I knew she wasn’t using me for that. She had her own career. She had an education. She was entirely appropriate for a spouse.

For someone who had dedicated sixty-plus hours per week every week of his life to building the Wolfe empire, his true love, his true passion, his why was his family name . Not the people in his family. The name. His legacy. That was the only reason he did what he did. He built this dynasty to pass on for generations.

All my life, I knew what was expected of me. I would work for the family business, get married, and have children, and they would also work for the family business. The blueprint was in my DNA.

“Declan, dear, what do you love about Serena?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a simple question. What do you love about your fiancée?”

“Where is this coming from?”

Besides the fact that Wolfe’s did not talk about things, Gran did not have patience or interest for small talk. She once told me that she’d rather get her eyeballs tattooed than be subjected to tedious, idle chit-chat. It was in reference to her being asked to serve on the PTA at the boarding school I attended when I was twelve.

“I was going through some papers in your grandfather’s desk, and I found this.” She reached into her Hermès Birkin handbag and pulled out a piece of paper that was folded in half. She leaned forward and slid it across the desk to me.

When I unfolded it, I saw that it had a child’s handwriting on it. My name was in the top right corner and there was a tree that had writing on it.

“What’s this?” I began to read it and saw that it was some kind of questionnaire.

“It was an assignment your class did in first grade after you did family trees. You had to make a future tree, and on the branches, you had to describe your future spouse.”

Ah, I saw where this was going.

“I was six.” I folded the page back up and slid it back to her.

“Did you read it?” She lifted her left brow.

“Why would I read it?”

She picked the paper up and unfolded it.

“When asked what you wanted your wife to look like, you said you wanted her to have hair like the sun and eyes like the ocean.”

Even as a kid, I’d always been a sucker for red hair and blue eyes. Later, I came to learn that it was a very rare combo. The rarest combination in the world, actually. I blamed it on my first crush being Ariel from The Little Mermaid . My mom loved Disney movies and would always put them on when she was sick in bed, which sadly was most of my childhood. I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, per se, but I was infatuated by her. Mesmerized. Captivated. Completely twitterpated, not to mix film references.

“I was clearly into nature,” I stated dismissively.

She glanced back down at the sheet of paper. “When asked what qualities you wanted her to have, you said that you wanted her to talk to animals like Dr. Dolittle.”

“Clearly an achievable goal.”

The truth was, as a kid, I loved animals and wanted to be with someone who shared my love of them. My mom was a huge animal lover, but since her health was so poor, we couldn’t have any. She was unable to take care of them, and my father was never around. Once she died, my brother and I lived with our grandparents or were in boarding school, so we never had any pets.

As an adult, I’d always been so busy with school and then work I never thought it was fair to have an animal who depended on me.

“You wanted her to be kind like Mrs. Sally.”

Mrs. Sally was the nurse at my first boarding school. She not only always had Band-Aids for any kids who got cuts on their knees or scraped their elbows, but she also brought baked goods in on Fridays, and when we were sick in our dorm rooms, she would bring us chicken soup and crackers.

“You wanted her to know everyone’s name and make everyone smile like Mr. Cooper.”

When I still lived with my mom and dad, Mr. Cooper was our mailman. He knew everyone’s name, which I now understood was because he read it on their mail, but I remember everyone lighting up when they saw him, even my mom, no matter how sick she was. He always left people happier than they were before they spoke to him.

“You said she needed to smell like strawberries and cake.”

I still loved a fruity vanilla scent to this day, so I supposed that hadn’t changed.

“And you wanted her to feel like your treehouse during the 4th of July.”

I shook my head dismissively at that answer, thinking it was ridiculous. Then I remembered that my mom died at the end of March. I didn’t cry at the funeral or even in my room. I didn’t cry when we moved to my grandparents’ house or when I had to move schools. But on the 4th of July, I went up to my treehouse to watch the fireworks. I felt safe there, for some reason. I cried and cried and cried, and I let out all my emotions. I knew that no one could hear me because the fireworks were going off. It was the safest I ever felt. That was the summer before first grade. I guess I just wanted to feel safe around her.

“So, is that who Serena is?” Gran asked as she folded the paper.

“I was six,” I reiterated instead of answering honestly.

The truth was…no. Serena wasn’t any of those things. In fact, she was the polar opposite of every one of those statements. She had dark hair and eyes. She didn’t like animals. She wasn’t particularly kind. She definitely didn’t take the time to know people’s names, and most people didn’t smile after being in her presence. If anything, they were intimidated by her. She favored more musky scents than light fruity vanilla. And she never made me feel as safe as I did in that treehouse. I’d never cried in front of her. She didn’t even have any idea about my OCPD or mysophobia.

My door opened, and Hannah walked in. I could see in her face that something was wrong. Very wrong.

“What? What is it?”

“The police are downstairs and want to speak to you.”

I stood. “Why?”

“Derek was in a car accident, and they are taking him to the hospital.”

“Is he okay?” Gran asked as I watched all of the color drain from her face.

It was the exact words she’d heard from the officers when they came to the door to tell her that my dad was in an accident.

“I don’t know. He was under the influence.”

“Call Harold Levine,” I instructed Hannah. Harry was my grandfather’s lawyer, and say what you will about the man’s family values, he was shrewd when it came to business, and he had the best people working for him.

I stood behind my desk, taking a moment to process and decide how I should proceed.

When I woke up this morning, I thought the most stressful part of my day would be the board meeting. Then Gran showed up with a paper I wrote when I was six about what I wanted in a wife and had me second-guessing a fiancée who I couldn’t even get a hold of. My brother got behind the wheel while under the influence and was in an accident and was now on his way to the hospital. There were police officers downstairs waiting to speak to me.

Sometimes, I felt so detached from everything around me, as if life were a movie I was watching. I didn’t feel connected to it. Today was one of those days.