Net Worth by Amelia Wilde
7
Charlotte
It turnsout a person can survive being kissed by Mason Hill in front of her parents.
A person can survive the still-tipsy climb up uncarpeted stairs to her bedroom and the tumble into bed and the silent weekend at home afterward. She can even survive the memory of the sharp tug of a necklace on her skin. That necklace breaking. Heat in his eyes. A glittering anger. And then that big fist, knocking on the front door.
It was supposed to be separate. He was never supposed to cross the boundary between my real life and the things we did as part of the agreement.
But then…
That kind of separation wasn’t in the agreement. He’s within his rights to do it. To cross every boundary I have, and then some.
Monday comes, and I go back to the office like Mason didn’t pull a necklace right off my neck and say my name like a cruel joke. What I didn’t say outside the restaurant is that it’s too hard to be Ms. Van Kempt for this. It’s too hard to be my father’s daughter. I don’t want to be a family representative when he has his hand around my neck.
Not choking me. Not really. Just the suggestion of it. Infuriating, humiliating suggestions.
Wednesday.
My father is waiting at his office door when I come downstairs in the morning, his eyes bloodshot. “You making site visits to Cornerstone?”
“One today, Daddy,” I tell him. I lean in through the alcohol burn and kiss his cheek.
“Send someone else.”
I laugh. “No, it has to be me. I don’t want to play a game of telephone with the foreman.”
“Don’t go near him, Charlotte.”
My face heats. “I’m going to supervise the project.”
He takes one step forward and crosses his arms over his chest. “You let him touch you like that in front of the crews—”
“Daddy.” I make my voice sharp as the anger rising in me now. If he’d dealt with this himself, I wouldn’t be making site visits. “I have to go. Everything will be fine.”
The anger simmers on the drive in. I had a couple of orders from my Etsy store last night. It’s convenient timing. A quick stop by the post office to send them out before I head in to the Cornerstone site. Phones started ringing at Van Kempt Industries on Monday. It turns out that Mason—and by extension, his company—doesn’t waste time. I have to bring some people back from the layoffs or make new hires so Van Kempt can keep up with everything. I can’t do that angry, but I’m pissed at my father.
I’m meeting the foreman today at Cornerstone. The partnership agreement has a clause that gives Van Kempt or its representative something called “consulting approval,” which I’m guessing means Mason will pretend to listen to my ideas about the property and then make the final call.
It’ll be good. This is going to work out. A visit to Cornerstone to reassure myself, and I’ll be able to walk into the meeting on Friday with my head held high. At the very least, I’ll be able to look him in the eye.
He’ll make me do it anyway.
I can’t think like that now. I turn up the music on my phone and try not to miss the delicate weight of the necklace he let me wear on Friday. Made me wear. He did make me do it. I didn’t ask him to bring jewelry. But I didn’t refuse. It felt good to have him put it on me. I can admit that to myself with the song drowning out all my conflicted feelings and embarrassment.
It felt good to wear the jewelry. And it felt good to have his hands so close to my skin.
Even if I do hate him.
Which I do.
There’s a little parking lot close to the site. It feels good to step out of the car and stretch. I wore ballet flats today. Work-appropriate leggings and a sleeveless top under a structured shirt I made myself.
It takes all of five seconds for regret to set in.
Crash in.
Because he’s here.
I see Mason as soon as I turn the corner on what’s now a full-fledged construction site. Two weeks ago it was a steel-beam skeleton and empty ground. Now men crawl everywhere over the structure. Trucks come and go along the road, turning into the property. Dropping things off. There’s the metal-on-metal rattle of work being done. They’ve been at it a while.
And at the base of it stands Mason in a pair of dark slacks and a white shirt that’s too clean for a place like this. Too perfect. He’s with the foreman, a guy named Dave, and the two of them have their heads bowed over an iPad. Mason lifts a hand like he can wipe away all the construction that’s already done. The gesture says forget about this bullshit.
He’s changing things. I know he is. From the way he speaks, even from this distance. The way he stands. His hand cuts another no through the air.
Dave notices me before Mason does. Says something to him. Mason turns, and when his eyes land on my outfit, they get brighter. Greener. It’s impossible, even in the golden morning sun, but it happens. It makes my heart pound.
I stride up to them and step around Mason, ignoring him in favor of shaking Dave’s hand. “It’s good to have you back on the job.”
He smiles. He’s a decent guy. I don’t know anything about construction and only a little about the development, but he’s walked me through a lot of it step by step. “I’m glad this place is getting done. We’ve got some adjustments to make, but—”
“What adjustments?” Keep your smile on, Charlotte.
Mason angles himself into the conversation. “I’ve made a number of adjustments to the construction plan.”
“I’m sure you didn’t, because this is the plan that’s been approved by the council.”
“I’ve had this plan vetted and approved, too. It’s gone through my teams at Phoenix. Nothing to be concerned about.” He turns back to Dave. “The reduction in units is going to give us the space to—”
All I hear is reduction in units. Mason can’t do that. I’ve had to fight to understand all the pieces of this project. It’s a thousand times more complicated than making a dress. Designing the pattern itself takes a team of people, and then there are others who have to fit that design into the available money. There is no more available money. If fewer people buy condos in the development, we don’t get what we need out of it. If there are fewer units to sell, we’ll be screwed. We’ll be underwater when the deal is done.
I’ll have sold myself for nothing.
“You cannot reduce the number of units in the building,” I announce.
Dave clears his throat.
“We’ve had people working on this for a long time. The design is good. The plan is sound. And we need every one of those units to get a return on our investment.”
“Ms. Van Kempt—”
“I don’t care what you have to do. Put them back in. Go back to the old plans. We need those units. You’re not taking them out.”
Construction noise decorates the silence between the three of us. Damn it, I feel so small next to him. So out of my depth.
“The new plans have been approved, and that’s what we’ll be using going forward.” Mason’s firm, but there’s no bite behind the words.
It doesn’t matter. My face burns anyway. “You can’t do that.”
“I own the majority share, Ms. Van Kempt, so I am well within my rights to bring this project in bounds. It had to be done.”
I can’t look at his beautiful, terrible face anymore, so I throw a pleading look at Dave. “You saw the original plans. You know they were good.”
Dave rubs the back of his neck. “They were a good starting point,” he offers diplomatically. “No one expected the project to run so long. Nobody expected—” He cuts a glance at Mason. “Nobody expected for things to turn out the way they did. It wasn’t your fault, Charlotte. You did your best. Everybody did their best. But he’s right. This is how it gets done.”
How it gets done means more than just the development being built. How it gets done means saving Van Kempt Industries. Saving my entire family. That’s what this was, and I don’t understand how it’s going to happen now. I don’t see how it works, if Mason is stripping out that ability from Cornerstone in front of my face.
Tears sting the corners of my eyes.
Screw the tears.
I put on my biggest, brightest smile. “Got it. I’m just going to take a look at how things are going. If you need me, I’ll be—” I wave vaguely down the street. “Thanks for the explanation.”
All my focus goes to blinking back the tears as I move past them. A little rise at the corner of the site gives a relatively safe view of all the construction going on below. My throat squeezes, hot and tight with the humiliation. My own foreman. Dave. Dave. How could he? I don’t see a damn thing when I reach the top of the hill. I turn my back on Cornerstone and look down the nearest street. All those finished buildings. All those hopes and dreams, made into reality. I’ll get there one day. I will.
I don’t see Mason following me.
I only feel him, once he’s already there. Tall and solid.
“Ms. Van Kempt.”
I don’t answer.
“Charlotte.”
“What—” I wipe away my unshed tears and readjust my shirt. “What do you want?”
Hands on my shoulders turn me around. Not to face him, but Cornerstone.
“We’re confined by the construction that’s already been started, but the original design only included the bare minimum in safety and stability. You can see a crew on the ground right now. The first thing they’re going to do is reinforce the base of the structure.” He points, and there they are. Men surrounding a truck. More beams. More concrete.
“It’s only forty stories. We didn’t need—”
“The original design wouldn’t have lasted thirty years. You’d have had sinking in the foundation by year five, and that’s not taking possible flooding into consideration. If we’d built on this foundation without making improvements, the whole structure would have been at risk.”
“But the plan was approved.” All those men, all that movement, all that work. I don’t understand it like Mason does.
“It was approved based on construction standards for this year.”
“Right, so…”
“So a development like Cornerstone is meant to be a legacy property. It’s a new build, which means everything about it has to be forward-thinking to make up for its lack of a past.”
“People love new houses.”
“In this market, they want it both ways.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It’s not impossible. It’s a problem of design and position.” He sweeps his hand up and up and up until I’m looking into a summer-blue sky. When he’s finished, this is where the tower will hang in the clouds. “I adjusted the foundation to anticipate the safety standards that will be in place ten years from now. Storms will be worse by then. Flooding will be worse. Cornerstone will be ahead of its time by then.”
“No one will be able to see that, though. It’s all hidden.”
“No. That’s why I’ve made changes to the interior as well. Fewer units on some of the floors, but we’ll be approximating green space.”
“What?”
“Indoor gardens. They have a net positive on the air quality in the building, in addition to top-of-the-line HVAC and filtration design. They’re also carveouts for natural light in the event of power failure.”
“There are generators.”
“The property needs both novelty and luxury to attract the kind of buyer who will make the development self-sustaining. The more sought after the units, the more people will pay to own them permanently. The less they’ll fight about building upgrades. People will outbid each other all the way to the moon when one comes up for sale.”
“But that won’t help me, because we have to sell this to make a profit. We have to sell the whole thing. You—you agreed to sell it as soon as construction is finished.”
I turn to face him now, and I find no mocking grin on his face, no sneer. Mason looks back at me. “It’s rare to make a profit off obvious desperation. When construction is finished, every unit will already be under contract. There’s no imperative to unload the property, in that case.”
“We needed all those units.”
A nod. “I’ve added several stories to the design. Adds height, prestige, and overall units. More space between the floors.”
“For what?”
“Safety upgrades. Buyers won’t find them sexy and desirable at the time of sale, but they’ll be grateful.”
“What more did you need to add?”
“A better fire suppression system.” It sounds like another item he’s ticking off a list, but darkness flits through his eyes.
The breeze plays in my hair, cooling the back of my neck. He’s too beautiful to look at in this sunlight. Mason doesn’t stop me from turning my attention back to the development.
He knows what he’s doing.
He didn’t gut the units to fuck with me. And I’d bet anything that he’s also had his team go through the stripped-down, modern design my father had chosen and made it into something people would clamor over. Something they would outbid each other to the moon for. What we were doing before—it was popular a decade ago. And the things he’s changing to make the building more resistant to floods and fire make sense. We didn’t go top-of-the-line in the original design because they added so much to the cost, but Mason is right. People will be grateful.
A weird pressure at my collarbone feels a lot like…
Genuine respect.
Does he feel the same thing?
He hasn’t made any cutting comments about my clothes, or about getting on my knees, or about how much I hate this, the way he does on Fridays. He hasn’t taunted me about kissing me in front of my parents. My father didn’t come out of his office all night. My mother won’t say a word about it.
“Okay. Show me, then.”
“This way.”
Mason gestures down the rise and into the construction site, and I find the courage to ask him more questions about the changes he’s made. He answers all of them.
“What about the rooftop?” I ask as we navigate a support beam. “Did you change that too?”
He’s climbing in front of me. Bags of concrete on the other side. A steep climb around it to another beam. “Yes.”
Mason takes a step and something happens to his leg. The fabric of his pants moves in a way I wouldn’t expect. It’s because of the way he’s moving underneath. An unsteadiness. Not right. His next step corrects for it and he’s balanced again. He turns back, staying close. I reach for his arm on instinct. Somewhere to hold while we’re on unsteady ground.
“What’s wrong with your leg?”
“Nothing,” he says. His expression hardens, and I’m not imagining any darkness now—it’s there in his eyes, like a storm rolling in over the treeline. “No more questions, Ms. Van Kempt.”
