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Chapter 32

Asher Bennett Carter

Watcha Cove, July 2015

“By the way,” Asher said, now alone with his mother, looking at the watery ruins of Kennedy’s laptop sinking to the bottom of the tub. “I know.”

“Know what?” Jacqueline asked him, a sense of genuine confusion playing on her soft features.

“I know that I’m not really, you know, a Carter ,” he said, putting air quotes around his own last name.

He watched the shock register on his mother’s face, realizing that she was never planning on telling him for as long as he lived that his father wasn’t technically his father.

He expected her to offer a groveling apology, but instead, all he got in response was, “How?”

Asher sighed and said, “I heard you and Dad talking a few months ago when I was home. I was a little drunk and a little high, so I thought that I might be confused, but then it kind of made sense. He said something about how I was not really like him.”

Asher knew that he was summarizing poorly, but the repeat of what had actually been said was too painful to relive. He watched the color rise in her neck and cheeks, but his mother would never surrender to the indignity of an honest emotion.

Jacqueline looked Asher squarely in the eye. “Well, yes. That’s right,” she said after a long while. “Do you want to know what happened?”

Asher shrugged. He didn’t want to come across as too eager. He was his mother’s son, after all. “I’m assuming you had a good reason or whatever,” he said.

“Something like that,” Jacqueline replied evenly. “I was in my late twenties. I’d made a terrible mistake on a night when I’d received some bad news about an audition that didn’t go well. I was desperate because I was getting old and it was seeming like acting was never going to happen for me. I went to a bar after, and I ran into someone who was a friend. We got a little tipsy and ...”

Asher watched his mother’s eyes glaze over dreamily as she broke eye contact and stared out the window. He didn’t know where to look either, and so he did the same. They sat like that for a while until Asher made the decision to turn off the shower and tub. The only sound left was the steady drips from the faucets that were no longer running.

“I didn’t think I would ever have to tell you,” Jacqueline said to him. “Not that it mattered to your father; you were his son.”

“So who was he?” Asher asked, uncomfortable at the mention of William Carter Jr., who was lying just in the other room.

Jacqueline pulled at a pill on the surface of the cashmere she was wearing. “Well, that’s not important now. What matters is that you are a Carter. You are your father’s son, and that’s all anyone will ever know.”

Asher did have questions, but as a Carter, he also realized this was the most information about it that he was going to get. He rose to his feet and went to leave the room. As he did, he heard his mother start to say something else, so he paused to turn back to her. “I chose the better life for you,” she said. He knew that that was the truest thing she had ever said to him, and though he was not as misty-eyed as Kennedy, it touched him because in that act, the love was implied.

“I know,” he said and then turned to leave. He went back to his own room, where he hadn’t been for several hours, but saw it had been returned to being as clean and immaculate as if he had never been in it all. The staff was making sure that the newest household heads saw their value. The bed was made with tight militaristic precision, and it wrinkled slightly as he sat on it. He leaned his head back and must have fallen asleep, he wasn’t sure for how long, but he awoke to an urgent knocking outside his door.

When he opened it, bleary-eyed and lugubrious, he was irritated to see his sister and her friend on the other side. “We need to talk,” Kennedy said, pushing past Asher right into his room.

“Uh, hi to you too,” he said sarcastically.

He then noticed Tashia’s tearstained cheeks and red eyes seemed so out of place, not just in this house but as a reaction to, what, exactly? His father’s death? That didn’t make any sense.

“So first of all, it wasn’t me,” Kennedy said, rounding on him once she was inside the room.

“What are you even talking about?” Asher asked, still confused and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes from his nap.

Kennedy looked at Tashia. “Do you want to tell him? Or do you need me to?”

Tashia took a single deep, shaky breath and tugged at one of her burgundy-dyed locs. “I’ll do it,” she said. “Asher, do you remember someone from Princeton named Ernest Morris?”

Asher reached into the recesses of his mind. He did know exactly who Ernest Morris was, the same way he would know the type of car he first crashed (a Ferrari 458 Spider), but like the car, he had forgotten most details about Ernest as soon as he was ruined. He had recently heard his name when Viraj had run into him, but even then, the memory floated in and quickly receded. Tashia’s saying it to him now transported him right back to a cold New Jersey evening when Ernest, flanked by his social justice warrior army, tried to make his personal misfortune Asher’s problem.

“Hello?” Tashia said waving her hand slowly back and forth in front of Asher’s glazed-over expression.

He shook his head quickly and answered her and Kennedy. “Yes, I know who that is,” he said cautiously.

“Well, until yesterday, he was my boyfriend,” Tashia said.

Asher fought not to pull a face. He remained neutral with great effort.

“And as it turns out, he was using me to get information on your family fed to me through my friendship with Kennedy, and he was the one conducting investigations that were triggering security alerts for your father,” Tashia said quickly, and Kennedy nodded along, vindicated in her innocence.

“Wait, what?” Asher reached into his hair and tugged a little on the curls, trying to give himself a factory reset for his brain. “Why the hell would he be doing that?”

“I don’t know for sure, but it seems like he had a kind of vendetta against you maybe, and also really rich people in general. He was, until pretty recently, working at a Carter Corporation–funded school in Ghana, and he said that he saw and heard some pretty fucked-up things.”

Asher exchanged a look with Kennedy. He wanted to know what she had told Tashia but could not ask with Tashia in the room. He knew that everything in Ghana was not exactly perfect, but he couldn’t imagine what could possibly inspire Ernest Morris to stalk his family. What happened at Princeton wasn’t even that big of a deal. Why on earth would he be so obsessed?

“I’m lost,” he said, truly confused.

“I came up here as soon as I figured it out. I don’t think I was ever supposed to see what he was doing, but he was posting information on message boards anonymously about your father and his business, and he was running a blog with all his findings like some sort of independent reporter. I found the blog and disabled it from being live. He might know by now. I’m not sure. I haven’t talked to him since I left his apartment in the middle of the night last night,” Tashia said. She let out a tiny sniffle.

“Tell him what the blog said,” Kennedy suggested gently in a quiet voice.

“Right. The blog said that your dad is—was—an international thug, basically, that he ran his business off of intimidation and bribery, and that he didn’t care who he hurt in the process. He had a story in there about a sixteen-year-old kid who lost his arm working on a project. Also, he had a problem with the founding of the Carter Corporation because it was funded by two white men but fronted by a Black man who then exploited a local population and essentially stole their resources. That’s what he said. He said if people wanted real answers, they should follow the money. But the worst part is that because Kennedy had found out about Kofi, he knew about that too. I don’t know how much deeper his knowledge is, but I just feel so bad. I didn’t know I couldn’t trust him.”

This certified weirdo had no right to do this, but a new, unfamiliar feeling had begun to replace the immediate rage that Asher felt while learning this information. He recognized it fleetingly as guilt. He had spent months blaming his sister for putting too much time and effort into her birthday video project, for asking too many questions, and this whole time there was an actual interloper attempting to expose, humiliate, and ruin his father. Kennedy was still partially to blame, he rationalized, but not totally, and since they’d both created this mess, they both had to fix it.

Asher cracked his knuckles. He was now finally ready for a physical fight with Ernest. “Where is this guy now?” he asked Tashia.

“What are you going to do?” she asked him back.

“Calm down,” Kennedy said, her voice more confident than Asher was used to hearing. “I think we have to handle this ourselves. Mom is dealing with a lot right now, and she doesn’t know any of this. I think we need to handle this on our own and ... quietly.”

Asher snorted. “Okay, so what would your plan be?”

Kennedy bit her lip and faltered at a response.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Asher said. “Okay, listen: this loser obviously has a hard-on for me, so why don’t you let me handle it. It sounds like it’s me he wants, anyway.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” Kennedy asked him.

“I’m going to handle it. What, you don’t trust me?” he retorted.

“No!” Kennedy exclaimed.

“Today seems like a great day to start,” he said ignoring her protest. Asher turned to Tashia. “I need to know everything that you know. And then, we’re going to New York,” he said.

Asher felt his posture harden as he listened to Tashia detail the timeline of her relationship with Ernest, and as she kept talking, he felt more and more energized. He began to realize what the source of his newfound personality was. It was power. He had just inherited billions, and with that came the responsibility that he had to protect that at all costs. More than that, he knew that he had to solidify his place in this family, to make himself legitimate even if genetics said that he was not. He finally understood his father in a way that he never had before, and he realized why his father acted the way he did. There were always people trying to come for them, but he had impressively shielded them for most of their lives. He had fortified the family to ensure its continuity, and now Asher had to do the same.

“Tashia, can you take us to him? The element of surprise is on our side. We can take the Gulfstream back,” he said, a slight shiver running down his spine that he would not have to ask permission to do this.

Tashia pointed silently, confused, to the window, where the hurricane that had trapped them with his father’s dead body in the first place was still raging outside. “Okay, not now ,” Asher conceded. Back in high school he got grounded, literally, for trying to charter the jet to see a camp friend of his out of state, but he liked the idea that he was in charge of when the plane took off and landed now, weather permitting.

“I think you should stay here,” Asher said to Kennedy.

“I’m going,” she said assertively.

He shrugged. “Suit yourself, but I don’t think you have the ...” He paused and searched for the right word. “... disposition for what this takes.”

Kennedy set her jaw. “I do,” she said. “I’m going.”

The next morning, on the short flight back to New York, Tashia provided as much additional information as she could on Ernest, on his pressing financial situation—a trifecta of student debt, bad credit, and limited income. For the first time, maybe ever, Asher and Kennedy were seemingly united. They had a singular common enemy and were resolute in their mission that he had to be neutralized.

It was Asher’s desire to cause him physical harm, naturally. It was Kennedy’s to make sure that Ernest Morris was silenced with tact and discretion. By the time they landed in Teterboro, they had a plan.