Page 157 of Broken Brothers

“You OK?” I said, wondering what I had said to cause her to act this way.

“Honestly?”

Well, I knew what the answer was now. I just had to wait to see why the answer was.

“No, I’m not OK. I’m trying to make right by you, Chance. I feel like I’m still paying for the sins of what I did when I was working for your uncle.”

“No, you’re not—”

“Then why do you keep pushing me away?”

I sighed.

“Because, as cliche as this sounds, it’s not you. It’s me. I’ve got—”

“And that prevents you from being with me?” she said, not bothering to hide the exasperation in her voice. “When is ever a good time, Chance? So you get your shit together and find a job or you start successfully investing again. But then you have to focus on your job or your investments so it’s your work. Then you feel settled in and want to explore your options, but then Mom gets sick. Or Morgan breaks a leg. Or whatever. The point is…”

She sighed, collected herself, and folded her arms.

“I don’t want to sound like the desperate former lover, even though I realize that’s what I’m doing right now,” she said. “But it’s more a desperation to feel like everything is OK betweenus. Even over the past bit, after everything went down, we were building up to flirtation. The only thing I know of you, Chance, is passion and romance. I don’t know what friendship is like. So it feels like everything that’s happening right now is just… I don’t know. That you want to, not use me, I don’t think you’re that kind of guy, but keep me at arm’s length while passively having the fact that you can sleep here.”

“If you want—”

“No, that’s not why I said that, and you know it,” Layla sternly said. “Just… I don’t know.”

I felt like I was having the exact same conversation as yesterday. And yet, strange as it was for me to admit, something about this particular conversation just felt a little more vulnerable, a little more open, a little more… like maybe I would want to date her again.

A million bucks in the bank had a way of making the mind settle a bit.

“Look, I’ll say what I said yesterday, I think you’re attractive and I think, knowing what I know now, could something work? Sure, it’s definitely possible. But there’s just so much shit for me to figure out right now. I had a lot of weird shit go down today, between my mom’s news and Claire coming to me. Back to back. As if fate had set it up.”

Fate, of course, being the operative and cover word for what I really suspected.

“You really didn’t know that my adopted parents were getting divorced?”

Layla let out a long sigh, looking straight ahead, seemingly refusing to answer. That, in itself, seemed to give me the affirmation I had long suspected.

“No,” she said. “Not… no.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her, but just as I was about to say something more, my phone buzzed with a news alert. I grabbed my phone and snorted at the headline.

“Mogul Edwin Hunt getting divorced; billions at stake.”

“Someone leaked the news,” I said, having a pretty strong suspicion the leak had not come from Edwin or anyone in his camp.

I took a closer look at who had published the headline and was a bit floored to realize the New York Times was the one to have pushed that. The fucking Times! Not some dinky, tiny local paper that focused on sensationalism over the real stuff, but the goddamn Times.

This really was a huge fucking deal. Anytime billions of dollars got put on the line, many greedy hands liked to get in the mix or at least hear the news of what was going down; this was now definitely from the mouth of my mother. I didn’t know how I had missed the fact that she was so resentful for so long to Edwin Hunt, but now I realized that there was perhaps no greater pressure in the universe to Edwin Hunt than a public, prolonged divorce for the world to see.

Not only would it affect him, perhaps to his greater concern, it would affect the public evaluation of his companies. He would lose billions to my mother, but he’d lose even more billions to the sway of the public markets, on lost opportunities, and more. Many businessmen would abstain from working with him, for fear of the stain this would create.

In short, if ever I wanted a chance to strike at Edwin Hunt, I doubted there would ever be a time in which he would be as vulnerable as this.

“Do you think Morgan found out?” Layla said, concern evident in her voice. “You should call him and see how he’s doing. I doubt he’s enjoying the news.”

While Layla might have been coming from a kind place, the very name of Morgan, hearing it spoken, sent me into something of a tizzy. I burned at how he had ratted me out, I burned at how he had betrayed my trust, I burned at… everything. I could think his name and not be bothered by it, but like Pavlov’s dog, I just instinctively hated the sound of that name coming from anyone else.

“No,” I said. “No.”