Page 23

CHAPTER 23

MARCUS

As expected, the house is empty when I arrive home. I sort of lied to Ashton. I am spending Thanksgiving at Mom and Greg's house, but I'm the only one here. My aunt Susan is sick, so the family is going to her for the holiday. I normally would join them, but our break is too short to make a flight worth it. We have to be back on campus tomorrow evening to catch the bus to the airport for our first away games. Most of the players went home this past weekend after our game against Charleston Southern, but the last thing Susan needs is another person crowding her house when she's been dealing with bad headaches and fatigue. My mom and Greg will take care of her and keep her company, and in the meantime, I’ve been able to get some extra study time in. Or at least try to, with the massive distraction that is Ashton James sitting near me.

Not to mention that I'm not really in a good place to be around a lot of people, especially people that show their love by being nosey as hell. I'm pretty sure Sean knows something is up, because I abruptly hung up a video call with him last week when Ashton showed up to my dorm to see if I wanted to go get food. I've been avoiding his calls and texts, which I'm sure is only making him more suspicious.

I would have stayed on campus, but I had an odd memory the other night when Ashton and I were talking about our parents and our guesses about what caused them to hate each other. It was a memory of a box I'd found in the back of a closet, and finally gathering the courage to ask my dad about what was in it. I wasn't afraid of how he'd react, but I knew I shouldn't have been snooping. I was just curious, especially considering everything that had happened recently with AJames Enterprises being responsible for my father losing his business. I knew it was raw, and he was exhausted, but my brain couldn't let it go.

We were on the driveway playing basketball, which was where we took all our big conversations. It's where we had every hard or awkward talk, where we shook off our stress and growing pains. It's where I came out, and where he first told me that his business, his passion that he had put so much into, was closing. A lot of my memories take place on that driveway.

“You wanna talk about it?”

“What’s that?”

“Whatever it is that’s got you in your head.”

I nod and think about how to ask. “Um… Remember the other day, I was organizing the closet to add all your work files? I found some pictures of you and grandma, and some people I didn't recognize." I don't mention the cease and desist letter. "I wasn't trying to snoop," I say quickly.

"I know you weren't, and even if you were, that's pretty normal. I wasn't trying to hide that box from you, exactly. More like I was hiding it from myself, if I'm being honest."

"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

Dad cocks his head and wrinkles his nose. "You're a good kid, Marc. And I appreciate your thoughtfulness. But I can tell you're dying to ask, so go ahead. I'll tell you what I can."

"Who were those people?"

"That was my family at one time. Or rather, my step-family. My mother remarried when I was about your age."

Too many questions rush into my head at once. I don't know where to start. Dribbling slowly, I try to collect my thoughts. Dad waits patiently, the way he always does.

"Why don't I know them?"

"Well, you know how your grandma died when I was in college, right?" I nod. She was in a bad car accident, died on impact. "Her husband, my stepdad, was in the car with her. He also didn't make it."

"And the boy?" I think, remembering that the boy from the picture seemed familiar. Maybe he's a friend of the family now and I didn't know the connection? That seems unlikely, although so is my dad having an entire family he never told me about.

"Junior," my dad says. "He was my stepbrother."

"Did he die too?"

Dad shakes his head. "No, but we had a strained relationship. It wasn't always like that. We were as close as could be at one point. It was… complicated."

"Complicated how?"

"Some of it I'm not sure I understood myself, but a lot of it had to do with his own relationship with his parents. His dad had a lot of high expectations for him, and I think Junior resented my easier relationship with his dad. He also lived with his mother some of the time, and she hated that her ex-husband had remarried. Once she told their entire country club that my mother was responsible for tearing her marriage apart, even though they'd been divorced for years by the time my mother came into the picture. She called us gold diggers and filled his head with a lot of bad things. He was always worse when he came home from visiting her. "

"That's terrible."

"Like I said, complicated. In the beginning, he resented me being there, resented my mother, and let me know whenever he got the opportunity. Things were often over-competitive. I'd like to say it was one sided, but for being three years older and more mature, I engaged more than I should have. I egged him on."

"That seems pretty normal for siblings," I say, as if I know anything about what it's like to have siblings. I have a cousin I'm close with, but we never had to live together and compete for attention from our parents.

"Over time, we got along a little better, although he'd sometimes lash out after a long visit with his mom. In the six months or so before I left for college, we got pretty close. Maybe closer than we should."

My forehead scrunches. What does that mean?

Dad sighs deeply and keeps talking like he didn't just say something so cryptic. "Matilda, that was his mom's name, she didn't approve of us spending time together. She encouraged Junior's spoiled behavior, and I have a feeling she created a lot of the competitiveness that Junior felt towards me and my relationship with his dad. She filled his head with paranoid ideas that my mother and I were trying to leech away their fortune. Despite being richer than God, AJ wasn't like that. He was generous with us, yes, but he was also kind and caring and never treated us like we were below him just because we didn't come from money."

He accepts my pass and attempts a free throw, shrugging when it bounces off the rim and rolls away. "She was toxic, to put it as kindly as I can." I give him a moment to collect himself while he retrieves the ball. I think I see him blink back tears as he stares down at the ball. Dribbling slowly, he makes his way to the center of the driveway.

"When our parents died, she was named the executor of the estate. Junior was only seventeen. I was twenty and in college, and suddenly my entire life was flipped upside down. Not only was my mother gone, and my stepfather, who was a good man, but so was all the support I'd come to rely on. My tuition, room and board, the account I was given for expenses. Everything was cut off."

My heart aches for the young man he was, losing everything at once like that. I can't imagine how despondent I'd be if I lost one of my parents, much less the only one I had. And then to have to deal with all the rest of that at the same time? How could anyone be so cruel?

"That's not fair. How could she get away with that?"

"No one ever discussed a will with me, so I didn't know what I could do. I didn't seem to have any legal recourse, but I felt like I should have at least been entitled to have my mother's things or be allowed inside the house to pack up my own room. But they locked me out in every conceivable way."

"Junior didn't do anything to stand up for you?"

"That last summer, we'd had an argument that got out of hand. It was my fault."

"What happened?"

"I made some assumptions about Junior that he didn't appreciate. When he reacted poorly, I pressed. I thought I was trying to help. But when I wouldn't let it go, things escalated." Dad runs his fingers along the scruff on the edge of his jaw. There's a scar there that I know he got from fighting when he was young. I always thought he meant like a playground fight in elementary school, but without him telling me, I know that's not the case. This Junior guy gave him that scar.

"Seems like he took after his mom," I say sourly, not liking the idea of someone hurting my dad, or making him as sad as he looks right now. Hell, in this moment, he’s almost as upset as the day he closed up his store for good and watched it get bulldozed in the same afternoon.

"You can't really blame him. He was under a lot of pressure."

"And you weren't?"

"Until our parents died, not really. I lived an easy life, worrying about nothing except my studies and how I was going to get Julia Flores to give me the time of day." He waggles his eyebrows playfully, and I'm glad for the moment of levity. It doesn't last long.

"How is it that your parents didn't name you in any sort of will? You said he was rich, and they were married for five years before they died, right?" He nods, pursing his lips like he knows exactly what I'm about to ask. "That didn't seem fishy to anyone?"

"It did to me. And I was upset. I didn't expect or want some big inheritance, but I was left with nothing. Not only was it unfair, but it seemed unlikely that a wealthy, professional guy like AJ wouldn't have an updated will after being married for five years, or that my mother didn't have one at all."

"Do you think Matilda…" I trail off, not really sure how to phrase my question, seeing as I know nothing about estate planning or laws.

"I don't know," Dad says, answering my unspoken question. "But I asked. Publicly. And it caused them a lot of trouble. Their business got put under a lot of scrutiny, and they lost investors."

"Good." I raise my hands when Dad gives me a look. "What? From my point of view, you were the one getting screwed over."

"You're forgetting how young Junior was. That he'd been under immense pressure his entire life. And he lost a parent, too."

My face falls. The pain he feels for his ex-stepbrother is obvious. "So, what did you do next?"

"Something I'm not proud of."

I look at him questioningly.

"I took a bribe. Matilda offered me what seemed like a lot of money at the time. It was enough to get me through my next year at school, but I underestimated the cost of living in a big city, and I ran out of money pretty quickly. I took out some pretty steep loans to finish my degree, but I made it through. I worked hard and started a business from the ground up, doing something I loved. And most importantly, I started a family."

Holding the ball against his side, he reaches out with his free arm and pulls me in for a hug.

"Our family being together and happy is all that matters to me. All the money and success in the world could never touch what we have. If nothing else, AJ taught me that."

I always wondered what any of that had to do with AJames Enterprises and the cease and desist letter, but I never got the chance to ask. The topic changed, probably purposefully on his part, and I let him distract me by discussing what clips I wanted in the promo video I was using to get into a basketball camp I wanted to go to. The same camp where I had my first encounters with the boy he’d warned me away from.

The real reason I drove all the way to an empty house was to hopefully find that box. I feel a little guilty for going through my mother's things, but it's not like I can talk to her about it. While my mom hasn't yelled at me or tried to have Ashton removed from the team, she has made it known how uncomfortable she is with me getting close to him. I told her we're just teammates who are trying to be friendly with each other, which wasn't a lie when we'd initially had the conversation after the interview aired. But the other times she's brought it up in the weeks since, not to mention the number of times Greg has found me eating lunch with Ashton instead of on my own or in his classroom like I did most of last year, I've had to change the subject or assure her there's nothing happening between us. It was a lie I’ve been telling myself as well as them, trying to deny the raging hard on I have for Ashton James. And who am I kidding? I've had it bad for him since we were fifteen years old, and my first kiss was interrupted by tragedy. There's been nothing but intrigue surrounding him since the first time I noticed him and asked my dad what the big deal was.

"If he's anything like his dad, he's not trustworthy."

And I think… I think he called Ashton's dad Junior . I asked Ashton about it, and he said no one calls his dad that. So I could be wrong about this hunch I have, but there's only one way to find out.

Greg's house is modest by Cumberland standards, but much larger than the home I grew up in. It has a large open floor plan on the main floor, with an office and a guest room to one side of the living room, and the kitchen, dining room, and a sunroom on the other. There are three bedrooms upstairs, and a loft on the third floor that Greg uses as his nerdy man cave.

I start in the downstairs office, because that's where mom has her work stuff set up. Since she didn't have to worry about working so much, she finally started doing some graphic design stuff online. It started with stuff like menus for restaurants or website graphics. But since she has more time to read now, which was always her true passion, she fell into making book covers. Most of her clients are indie romance authors, but she's been commissioned by a few larger name publishing companies, as well. She loves it, and it allows her enough flexibility to do volunteer work and pursue hobbies that she hasn't been able to in a long time. Which, looking around the office, seems to mostly involve collecting books. She told me Greg built her some bookshelves, but I had no idea it was an entire wall of them, and that she'd already made impressive progress filling them up. Since I'm snooping anyway, I pull a few titles down, raising an eyebrow in surprise at some of the dirty stuff I find. One whole shelf is even dedicated to gay sports romance, which distracts me from my task for an entire hour.

Me: What the hell have you been reading?

Mom: Don't judge me.

Me: I'm borrowing some of these.

Mom: Don't dog-ear the pages or use them as coasters. Those are my children now that you've flown the nest.

Me: Should I be concerned?

Mom: Only if you hurt my babies.

Mom: Seriously though, some of those get pretty racy. You're an adult and all, but I feel like I should warn you.

Me: Uh, yeah. I opened one of them that looked like it was about Motocross and ended up reading about two dudes beating the crap out of each other one page, then beating the crap out of each other in a very different way on the next.

Mom: Oooh, that's a good one. It's a series, make sure you grab all three.

I shake my head, marveling at how much life has changed that I'm borrowing porn from my mom. Shuddering, I go to put the books back on the shelf but think twice and make a little pile to take back to school with me instead. It'll be nice to have something to read on the plane to Vegas tomorrow night.

It's sad that I can talk about dirty books with my mom but can't tell her who the main character in my own fantasies has been. Or that I took things too far, again, and really wish I could talk to someone about it. Ollie, my old teammate from Wake Prep, is usually pretty down to talk about stuff, but when I made the mistake of telling him about what happened with Ashton after the interview, he went a little nuts. His reaction was actually what helped me keep my distance for as long as I did.

Because if you can't be honest with the people closest to you, maybe it's a big clue that you're doing something wrong.

This thing with Ashton is complex. I'm not sure that it's wrong, per say. But I definitely can't be honest about it. Not until I figure out what happened between our dads. Only then will I be able to decide if it has any bearings on our friendship or anything else. If this is going to go any further, I don't want to have to hide it from my family like I have been.

Mom: There are some home-cooked plates in the fridge, and some goodies to take on the plane with you. Tell your coach and teammates I said good luck.

It would break her heart to know the kind of looks I'd get if I started passing around home-baked cookies to the team. Admittedly, they've all been a lot friendlier since Ashton stopped trying to hide our friendship. So, who knows, maybe they wouldn't toss them on the floor or look down their noses at them. I've been wrong before.

Not often though.

I find what I'm looking for in a small storage room in the loft, stacked amongst the various holiday decorations and overflow from our old house. I know the only reason mom hasn't gotten rid of a lot of this stuff is nostalgia, and she's probably keeping most of my dad's stuff for me. Not that I'd ever fit into any of his old t-shirts, considering I'm about twice his size in bulk. I pick one up and hold it to my face, imagining that I can still smell him the way I could for months after he died. All I can smell now is Ashton's body wash all over me. Would my dad be disappointed in me?

The black fabric file box has seen better days after being half smashed inside a larger plastic tote, but everything inside is intact. I comb through the pictures first, immediately recognizing the face I once thought of as curiously familiar. The boy next to my dad in the photos looks so much like Ashton, I can't believe I didn't see it before. I didn't know him well back then, I’d only had a few interactions with him by the time I found these. Why wouldn't my father have told me we were so closely connected with the James family? Why didn't he tell me Mr. James was his stepbrother?

The file folder pulses between my fingers with the hard thuds of my heartbeat. I open it, and there on top is the letterhead I remember.

Notice Of Cease And Desist

Dear Mr. Vell,

We are writing on behalf of AJames Enterprises regarding your recent public statements and actions directed towards the surviving family of the late Ashton James, including his son Ashton James II and his bereaved widow Matilda Vanderbilt-James. It has come to our attention that you have made defamatory statements and engaged in harassment against the James family, particularly concerning the inheritance matters following Mr. Ashton James' passing.

Your statements regarding Mr. Ashton James' estate and alleged entitlement to inheritance are wholly unfounded and without merit. It has been proven without a reasonable doubt that Mr. James did not leave a valid will designating you as a beneficiary in any capacity. Therefore, any claims or assertions made by you or your representatives regarding inheritance rights are baseless and misleading. Any continued action regarding this matter constitutes defamation and harassment and are causing significant distress to the James family and harm to the reputation of Mr. James' legacy. Such behavior is unacceptable and will no longer be tolerated.

We hereby demand that you and any representative of your interests immediately cease and desist making further defamatory statements or allegations against the James family, including Mr. Ashton James II and Matilda Vanderbilt-James. Engaging in any further form of harassment, including but not limited to contacting members of the James family, AJames Enterprises, or the press regarding the last will and testament of Ashton James.

Failure to comply with these demands will result in immediate legal action against you, including seeking damages for defamation, harassment, and any other applicable claims of harm to the James family or AJames Enterprises.

In an effort to resolve the matter amicably, we are prepared to offer you a one-time payment of $25,000 in exchange for your immediate cessation of all activities related to the aforementioned defamatory statements and harassment. This offer is contingent upon your compliance with the terms outlined in this letter and your agreement to cease all communication and actions against the James family and AJames Enterprises.

Please confirm your acceptance of this offer and your written commitment to cease all activities outlined above by the end of the month. Should we not receive your written confirmation of acceptance by this deadline, we will have no choice but to pursue legal action.

Sincerely,

Kenneth Richards

Richards and Langley Law Firm

Representatives of AJames Enterprises

Behind the letter is a signed and notarized agreement between my father and Matilda Vanderbilt-James, witnessed by Kenneth Richards. I recognize Kenneth Richards' name and signature as the same man that headed the legal team representing Kent Richards' assault charges against me in high school. I'm pretty sure Kent is his grandson. It makes sense that Kent would show up with an entire team of lawyers to intimidate me when he had the legal team of one of the most powerful companies in the country behind him. I never realized the connection, but he was Ashton's best friend.

There are some more papers in the file, including a legal pad with hand-written notes. My dad's handwriting was so bad, I'd be concerned that these notes could be the ramblings of a serial killer if I didn't know better. Bank statements in the files show the name Roman Vell listed as the beneficiary on his mother's personal accounts when they were opened, but then later there's documentation that says his name was removed from the accounts at some point before the accounts were drained and closed, all within days of her death. I see Kenneth Richards’ name mentioned several times in the notes, naming him as being on the board of trustees for the bank. Phrases like "wire transfers" and "offshore accounts" are circled. In the margins of one page, my father wrote notes of times and dates that he tried to contact Junior. Based on everything I see written, he believed that Matilda and the legal team for AJames Enterprises worked together to overhaul the estate and hide Ashton James senior's true last will and testament. Despite my dad having been so unorganized, all of these claims seem credible. And that they paid him off seems suspicious to me as well.

So now I know why our parents hated each other, and why it felt like AJames Enterprises had a personal vendetta against my father all these years. Now I just have to decide if this is something I should share with Ashton or keep to myself and hope he isn't like the rest of his family.