Net Worth by Amelia Wilde

11

Charlotte

Our house is alwaysquiet in the mornings. My dad doesn’t go to bed until late, and my mom doesn’t wake up early. Maybe that’s beyond her now.

Past nine, and I can’t bring myself to leave my bed.

No matter how I try to calm my fears about Mason and the agreement, to reposition them in the new sun, I can’t do it.

I am, as businessmen say, in breach of contract. Null and void. Canceled after non-compliance with terms. I broke the contract by leaving Mason’s penthouse last night before he was done with me. Now everything is going to fall apart.

More tears tease at choking me like a hand around my throat. I do deep, steady breathing to keep them from dropping onto the comforter. I broke the contract. I ran away from him. I ran away from him naked, clutching an expensive dress to my chest. That necklace hitting the floor was the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. He’s allowed to break necklaces he owns. What if the one I threw snapped, too? What if I’ve added even more to my family’s debt?

I stare out the window, finding landmarks to look at. A broken branch on a tree. A cloud cleaved in half by a slice of blue sky. These are not the kinds of things I should be focused on. He has the necklace, at least. I didn’t take it out with me and risk being accused of stealing. I’m not sure what to do with the dress. It’s on a hanger in my closet.

I search out a rose bush in bloom despite the lack of regular gardening. The curl of a new pattern up against the windowsill. How white the clouds are against all that blue.

Maybe I should have stayed.

It would have been an option. Steel myself to what was happening. Get through it. Keep my head up. That’s been the game all along. Sell myself, save my family. I knew that was the trade going in.

Maybe I should go back now.

I wrap both hands around my mug of tea. These thoughts aren’t completely honest.

It’s hot tea, and good. Perfect amount of milk. Perfect amount of sugar. It bolsters me enough to open another bill from the stack on my bed. The power company’s not happy. We’re rapidly approaching another FINAL NOTICE. I pick up my phone and dial the number. Their call is important to me, but all their representatives are busy assisting other customers.

I’ll wait.

I’ll wait as long as it takes.

The hold music is decent background music for some honesty. For some one-on-one reckoning with myself.

I ran naked into an elevator and fought my way into that dress because I was terrified.

I was terrified of Mason. Of course I was. It seems totally reasonable to have been shivering and near-tears in the face of all that masculine power.

But—and this is the part that’s tough to admit, even with my bedroom door locked and the hold music playing in my ear—I was also afraid of myself.

It terrified me, how wet and hot I was. For how mean he was being. For how cold. It was demeaning, being ordered to my knees and commanded to take his cock out and suck it. He talked to me like I was a thing. Like I was his property as much as the rug under my knees. As much as the Cornerstone building.

It’s not right to want that. It’s not right that I lay awake last night, thinking of how it felt and replaying it over and over in my mind for all the wrong reasons. More than replaying it, actually. I rearrange my legs under the comforter. There’s a silver lining. Now that everything’s done with, now that the contract is in shambles, I won’t have to admit to him that I touched myself thinking of kneeling at his feet with his cock in my hand. Imagining the scent of him, and his voice.

“Good morning! You’ve reached Eastern Electric. My name is Sarah, and this call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes. How can I help you today?”

“I—hi. Yes. Hi. I just got a bill for—for electricity.” Well, this is not the best introduction I could make for myself. I take a deep breath and think of a room without Mason in it. This room doesn’t have him in it. I rattle off the information she needs to verify it’s me. “We’re having trouble keeping up with the account, and I wanted to know if you would accept—” I’m not ready for this call. I put her on speaker and switch to my banking app. There’s practically nothing in the account. “Fifty dollars toward the balance to keep us in good standing until I can come up with the rest.”

A long pause.

I hold my breath.

“We can do that for you today, Ms. Van Kempt. I do have to inform you that we can accept no more than three partial payments in a calendar year. This will be your second.”

I was worried about my dignity last night. Keeping as much of it as possible. I’m not sure I have much left at this point. Is that scrap worth my family’s life? Should I have given it to Mason Hill without a backward glance?

That wouldn’t be the end. I know that now. It wouldn’t, because I might like the way he strips me of my dignity. I might like it.

It might make me wet.

I can’t think like that now. If that were true, if I gave in to it, how could I live with myself?

I’ve got my debit card in hand by the time the woman on the phone asks for it. When I hang up, I’ve bought us another few weeks.

“Charlotte? Are you here?”

My mom’s voice spirals up the stairs to my room. Good thing my tea’s half-empty. I didn’t spill it when I startled. “I am,” I call to her through the door, and climb out of bed.

“Could you come down here?”

I’m in leggings and a tank top. Smoothing my hair into place improves things enough to pad downstairs. My mother’s waiting in the middle of the foyer near her console table. She frowns in its direction.

I can’t see why she’s frowning until I’m all the way down on the main floor.

A bouquet dominates the center of the table. The blooms are a riot of summer colors. My mother cocks her head to the side and studies them from one angle, then another. She brushes her fingertips over pale coral petals. “Amaryllis,” she murmurs. “Expensive this time of year.”

My pulse is in my own fingertips. “Why this time of year?”

“Weddings,” she says. “Brides love them for weddings. They symbolize splendor and determination and…” She sighs. “Beauty.” My mother drops her hand. Shakes her head. Meets my eyes. “They were delivered a few minutes ago. I didn’t look at the card.”

The cream-colored envelope blends so well it’s like another bloom, only this one has Charlotte on it in neat print.

My mouth goes dry, but I’m not going to hint at nervousness in front of my mother. It will only set her off. First the fretting, which she’ll distract herself from with her roses. It won’t work. She’ll be in her room with a headache by late afternoon. No hesitating. I pluck the envelope off its plastic stem and open it.

See you Friday.

–Mason

It can’t possibly be relief that I feel, this cascade of heat and chill that expands my lungs like a too-deep breath. The contract is still on. No. It’s not just relief. Dread, too.

My mother looks over my shoulder before I can do anything but breathe.

“Friday?” she asks.

“We have a standing date,” I hear myself answer.

“Is it like the last time he visited?”

I want to disappear back into my room, shut the door tight, and hide. It makes my face flame to remember Mason escorting me into my own house and shouting for my parents like he had every right.

And it’s not like the time he visited, which my mother is being incredibly diplomatic about. Mason didn’t visit. He barged in and marked me in full view of the people I’m trying to save.

“No. It’s not like that.” I tuck the card back into the envelope and slip it into my pocket. “He owns the majority stake in Cornerstone now. He’s making sure it gets built, so we need to spend time together.”

She touches the flowers again, then studies my face. “Is it serious?”

It feels deadly serious. I swallow the instinct to laugh. “What do you mean?”

“The two of you.” My mother folds her hands in front of her, her back straight. I’ve seen her stand just this way at so many parties. So many events. It’s the way she would stand in a circle of other women, waiting for her turn in the conversation. I’m the only one to talk to. I’m the only one to wait out. “Is the relationship…committed?”

“We’re in business together.” I furrow my brow. “That’s our commitment.”

That, and spending Friday nights with my face red and Mason’s voice in my ear and his hands on my body.

Her nod is noncommittal. Not approving. Not disapproving. But her eyes slide back to the flowers.

The only way to talk about the kiss is to sidestep it, the way she is. I’m deploying her own skills against her now. Mild confusion, followed by a silence that’s meant to be easy. “What, Mama?”

She sighs. “We have a bit of a history with the Hills.”

“We do?”

“Natalie and James were part of our circle. Friends of ours. Their deaths were a tragedy.” Her hand flutters to her throat. “Shocking. There was a project—a development they were working on. It was finished when it went up in flames.” Her eyes flicker to the side, as if she doesn’t even want to imagine it straight on. “James and Natalie were in the building when it happened. They both died in the fire. All the children…”

My stomach sinks. I never looked up Mason Hill on the Internet. Couldn’t bear it. And if I had, I’d have known this. I wouldn’t be red in the face right now. I wouldn’t have tears in my eyes. People always say they can’t imagine a scenario happening to them, but don’t we all do that? Don’t we all imagine what it would have been like to find out your parents died?

And then I think of the painfully casual way he said a better fire suppression system at the Cornerstone site. Did he see the ruined building? Is the image seared into his mind?

“What did you do?” I press a knuckle to the corners of my eyes. “For Mason. And his siblings.” I didn’t know he had siblings. I didn’t know anything, and now I feel ridiculous.

The corners of her mouth turn down. “I’m ashamed to admit this.”

Cold, down in the pit of my gut. “Tell me what happened.”

“We could have done more, but your father—” Her eyes plead with me now to understand. That’s all she has to say, and it’s code for a lifetime of living with Cyrus Van Kempt. Your father. “I wanted to help. I wanted to do more. We were in a position to help.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“It’s been a long time,” my mother says quickly. “Fourteen years. I would hope for your sake that the past hasn’t colored your interactions.”

Of course it has. Of course it would have. I might have kept myself in the dark about Mason to spare myself the humiliation of knowing how powerful he was. How successful. But Mason knows about me. He sought me out.

He’s been so cruel. He’s been so awful.

But then…he’s also saving us. Saving me.

The bouquet throws its colors onto the bare wall behind it. Our house has been emptier and emptier by the month for more than a year now, but with the flowers, it feels almost right again. It’s made the echoing house a home. Absorbed some of the sound from all the hardwood where furniture and rugs used to be.

Mason sent me those flowers.

Another display of his money, and of his power over me. This gorgeous bouquet says that the contract isn’t dissolved until he says it is, and not a moment before.

But, like everything else we’ve done, it contains layers of meaning. He could have sent the note with no flowers. He could have sent a text message. An email. A voicemail, for God’s sake. He didn’t have to send the flowers.

See you Friday.

Three words on the card, but more are implied. I want to see you. I’m thinking of you. I miss you.

“I don’t want to assume the worst,” I say, because he is saving us, despite how mean he can be. I don’t know why he’s so rough when he has sex. Or why he demanded Fridays in the contract. Is it because of some random attraction to me? Is that just the way he has relationships?

Does it matter? He’s our only chance.

“I felt so awful,” she says, her voice dropping. “Natalie and I were friends. We spent summers together in Monaco. I wanted to help the children when it happened.”

“I understand.”

“Your father made the decisions,” she says, sounding urgent. “He was the one who decided.” Her hand comes up and she presses three fingers to her temple. “I have a headache, sweetheart. I’m going back upstairs.”