“I’m sorry! Really, I’m sorry, Caleb. I honestly got here as fast as I could. The traffic was the worst, beyond the worst! Even for New York City, this was bad. You’d think the whole world was falling apart or something.”

Elsie, who had come tearing into Caleb’s office stopped speaking abruptly, a stricken look on her face. It was a look Caleb knew well. He should know it well, seeing as it was one he’d worn more than a few times in his own life. It was the look that said, “I’ve stumbled into saying something I shouldn’t have, something that hits just a little too close to home, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to take it back.” He knew that look and despite the fact that he was exhausted, really and truly bone tired, he wanted to put Elsie’s mind at ease. She hadn’t said anything wrong, after all, she had only been trying to apologize. And besides, it wasn’t exactly like she’d made it out of this latest breach totally unscathed. Both pictures and footage of her from the club had been showing on multiple television stations for the duration of the morning, and it wasn’t exactly like it was all in conjunction with positive commentary. If asked, Caleb would have ventured to guess that the things Elsie had been called over the last several hours were worse than anything she had been subjected to in the rest of her years combined, and she had been subjected to that because of her association with him. It was an association he was paying her for, but still. He felt pretty shitty about it.

“Please,” he answered her tiredly, running his hands over his eyes and pressing on their closed lids to try and keep the headache from taking over him completely. “Don’t.”

“Don’t?” she asked uncertainly, her voice sounding so unlike what he was used to that he looked up quickly, momentarily convinced it hadn’t really been Elsie to come into his office at all. “I don’t understand. I said I was sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I mean...I can go. I can go, if that’s what you would like. I just don’t know what else to say.”

“No, I’m sorry. I wasn't clear. I’m not sure that I’ve been clear with anyone today, to be perfectly honest. I’m very tired, very...disoriented. Not that I’m trying to make excuses for myself. I understand that’s probably exactly how it sounds, but it’s not what I’m trying to do.”

“No,” she answered in that same small, timid voice that didn’t sound anything like the version of her he’d seen so far. “I don’t think that. I can see that you’re tired.”

“I am, but it’s not an excuse. And here I am, not even finishing my thoughts the way I should. What I meant to say, what I was trying to say, is that I don’t want you to apologize. If anyone should be apologizing, it should be me. Jesus, I can’t believe I got you involved in all of this. I don’t even know you, and I’ve made your life worse. That’s got to take some real talent, right? At least I can say that for myself, I guess.”

Caleb stopped speaking abruptly and drew his fingertips gingerly up to his temples. He shut his eyes against the light, shut them against the wide, beautiful eyes of Elsie, who in only one day he had managed to put in a situation nobody wanted to be in. He stopped speaking abruptly because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, but more importantly because he couldn’t trust himself to speak anymore. He could feel his throat starting to constrict; he could feel it grow thick with unshed tears, and he knew there was no way he would be able to talk to her anymore without breaking down. Even the idea of it was atrocious. Caleb could remember very clearly the last time he had cried in front of another person, and it had happened a long, long time ago. It had been at his father’s funeral, and when he had started to bawl (that was what he and his friends had called it back in the day, not crying but bawling) and he had done it in a way that had been so out of control, it had terrified him. He’d started crying by the grave site, standing there in the pelting, freezing rain as the wind whipped him back and forth so aggressively he wondered if it might push him down into the grave too, push him down on top of the coffin so that the gravediggers could pack the dirt on top of them both and leave them to spend eternity together. It had been his brother, Marlin, who had ultimately put a stop to the bawling. When Caleb looked back on it, he thought it should have been his mother to take on the job, but she had been too consumed with her own grief and with playing hostess to the scores of mourners who had come to pay their respects to even notice that he was falling apart. Marlin had been the one to notice and had first punched him in the upper arm, then pulled him aside where nobody else would be able to hear them.

“Cut that shit out,” he’s said in a voice that was not unkind but that was shocking nonetheless in its casual use of profanity. “You gotta stop that bawling, okay little brother? You gotta stop that bawling because it won’t bring him back. Nothing’s going to bring him back, and that’s a lesson you might as well learn now. No matter how much you cry about a thing, it won’t ever change the way things end up.”

The advice had been brutal for Caleb when he was such a young boy and even now, sitting behind his whale of a desk as the head of an entire corporation, thinking about that conversation made him feel too small. It had worked though, Marlin had seen to that very well indeed. Caleb had never been able to cry after that, and he was filled with an alarming mixture of disgust and relief with himself for being so close to it now. The relief came from the knowledge that he was actually still able to cry, but that was something to be dealt with later, dealt with in private. But the disgust? That was something for now because he would rather spontaneously burst into flames before allowing himself to cry in front of Elsie.

“Hey, Caleb?”

“Mm?”

“Caleb. Look at me, okay? Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude not to look at a woman while she’s talking to you?”

“I’m sure,” he answered, laughing a little in his surprise. “Maybe it was one of those lessons I chose not to learn.”

“Well, learn it now, because I want you to hear me. I’m in.”

“You’re...what?”

Caleb was looking at her now, really looking at her, and he felt his heart do a weird little flip flop in his chest. Sure, he’d seen her before, he’d basically picked her out of a lineup, for Christ’s sake (and what kind of a colossal asshole did that make him look like, by the way?) and given very specific “suggestions” to her boss about how he wanted her to look in order to play the part of being his new whirlwind-of-a-romance girlfriend. He’d spent the better part of yesterday with her hanging (unwillingly) on his arm like a piece of arm candy, and still he hadn’t seen her in the way he was seeing her now. Maybe it was because he felt so raw and unlike himself, maybe it was because of all of the memories that kept flooding his insides and making him feel brittle, but when he looked at Elsie now, he was sort of stunned by what he saw. She really was beautiful. He had already known that but now he felt it too. She looked to him like something that came out of a fairytale, but without the kind of delicate demeanor that usually came with the heroines in those kinds of tales. There was something hard in her, something much tougher than he could even pretend to be, and he thought that was where the secret to her beauty must lie. Also, he could see that she had taken the time to make herself up the way he liked, which he found absurdly touching. To put things quite plainly, he was floored. He was floored, and he had no idea what she was trying to tell him by saying that she was “in.”

“I’m in. I’m on your team. I know I kind of was already, seeing as you were paying me to be, but now I’m really in.”

“But why?”

“Because,” she said with so much conviction that it might have made Caleb laugh if the situation had been a different one, “this is a bunch of bullshit. They can’t treat people like this. This isn’t okay.”

“That’s why I said I was sorry. It’s my fault, Elsie, and I know it. I don’t say that lightly either. You don’t know me, so you don’t know this yet, but I rarely admit to being at fault for things. If I’m doing it now—”

“Then you’re doing it wrong,” she interrupted, stalking up to him on high heels that clacked authoritatively on the marble floor of Caleb’s office. “If you’re doing it now, you’re doing it wrong. You wanna apologize for being just—in general—kind of an asshole? Please, by all means, go ahead. Apologize for being the kind of man who won’t even pretend to date a girl if she doesn’t look a certain way. I’m sure I could think of plenty of reasons for you to apologize—”

“I’m sure you could, too,” Caleb interjected with a dry smile, actually starting to feel the smallest bit better for the first time since waking up in the Jersey girl’s apartment, “but maybe we could leave that for another day?”

“But this isn’t one of them,” she finished strongly, finished as if she hadn’t heard him speak at all. “Do you get that? I don’t care if you’re a total shit. This kind of thing is never okay.”

She was close to him now, very close, and Caleb felt himself slipping helplessly into the memory of the way her lips felt against his. He knew she would be mad as hell if she caught wind that he was thinking like that at a time like this, but having her lean forward on his desk so that he could smell her perfume and see the very faint bruises on the delicate skin under her eyes from lack of sleep drove his thoughts in a way he couldn’t control. It was ludicrous, criminally stupid even, but he wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to say fuck it to everything else going on. He wanted to slide the crap off of his desk so that there was nothing there between them and take her face in his hands. He wanted to kiss her until he couldn’t even remember what he was upset about, until he couldn’t even remember his own name.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t! Mr. Grant is in the middle of something, ma’am! You can’t just burst in there, you can’t!”

“Is that so? Watch me.”

It was the sound of voices shouting outside of his office that pulled Caleb out of his fantasy, and he was none too pleased about it. For starters, the fantasy was a hell of a lot more fun than considering how the fuck he was going to untangle the mess his hacker had made of everything. Secondly, he knew those voices, both of those voices, and what was coming was something he had no interest in handling on a day that had already been so full of bullshit.

“Christ,” he whispered, then looked at Elsie helplessly, who looked back at him with a question and building concern in her face. “I’m sorry, Elsie. You wanted me to wait to apologize until there was something really worth apologizing for? This is it. I'd tell you to prepare yourself, but I don’t think that’s possible with her.”

Caleb wanted to tell Elsie more. He wanted to try and condense an entire history of and explanation for his mother before she burst into his office and inflicted her unique presence on them both, but there wasn’t any time. She was coming. It was something he should have foreseen but somehow had not even considered, and there wasn’t a force alive that could stop her. He felt bad for his secretary for even trying and made a mental note to tell her after this was all said and done that when it came to his mother, she got a free pass. If he couldn’t stand up to her and tell her not to walk into his office anytime she wanted to as if she was walking into her own home, there was no reason to expect his little mouse of a secretary to be able to. And speaking of said secretary, before Caleb could even stand up, she came flying through the frosted double doors, her face as white as paper and her eyes wide and vacant.

“I tried to stop her, Mr. Grant,” she said in a harried, near-tears voice, her eyes darting around quickly as if she was afraid of being snuck up on. “I tried to tell her that you were busy with something, sir, but she refused to wait. She—”

“Is right here,” his mother’s voice boomed out from behind the secretary, who let out a little shriek and whom Caleb suspected he might be replacing in the not too distant future. His mother’s unexpected visits, the ones where she was good and angry, had a way of helping secretaries come to the realization that they weren’t cut out for doing office work after all.

“It’s alright, Patricia,” Caleb said quietly, feeling an eerie calm steal over him as he gave Patricia the secretary the gift of freedom from his dear old mom. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I seriously doubt that,” his mother quipped, studying her expensive-looking manicure as she spoke, as if she weren’t insulting someone she didn’t even know, “or else why would she be doing this job in the first place?”

“You may go, Patricia,” Caleb continued, as if he hadn’t heard his mom speak, something he knew she dearly hated but that felt necessary all the same, “and in fact, why don’t you take the rest of the day off? You’ve had a difficult day. It seems like it might be nice to have a little time to unwind. Maybe get a massage or something. Read a good book. I’ll have someone cover for you.”

Patricia smiled at him, a strained little smile that told him her fear of his mother had not diminished by even one single iota, and then she turned and practically ran from the room. When she passed by the formidable Mrs. Grant, Caleb saw that she actually flinched. He felt like he was watching a child in a haunted house who didn’t know if the figure she was passing was animatronic or real life. Caleb wondered if there was anybody else he knew that had a mother who could have that kind of effect on a person—and he came to the rapid conclusion that he couldn’t think of anyone. He wasn’t sure that there were any other mothers out there like his, and again, he wished fervently that he could have given Elsie a proper warning before the two of them met. Especially because Elsie seemed to be the thing in the room that his mother was the most interested in, and being his mom’s major point of interest was almost never a good thing.

“Well. You’ve got company, I can see.”

“I do. I believe that was what Patricia was trying to tell you before you followed her in.”

“Well, excuse me for that. I didn’t realize the continuation of a lover’s spat was more important than seeing your mother.”

“That’s not what I said, Mom.”

“No, it’s not. How many times do I have to tell you to come right out and say what you mean?”

Caleb took a deep breath and did his best to concentrate his efforts on keeping his shit together. He loved his mother very much, but she had a unique way of driving him batshit crazy that no other woman on the face of earth had been able to rival. She had a way of twisting his words around and turning them into something they weren’t, or at least something they weren’t supposed to be, and it always wound up making him feel nauseatingly guilty, despite the fact that he hadn’t done anything wrong. Not that he was claiming total innocence in this scenario, far from it, but he hadn’t done anything directly to his mom, and that was an important distinction to make. It might not have been important to anyone else, but it was important to him. The idea that she was saying he wasn’t able to come out and say what he meant was ludicrous, almost insulting even. If Caleb knew anyone who had a habit of twisting the way a thing was said in order to achieve a specific end, it was his mother. He didn’t remember her being like that when he was young, not back when his father was still alive. Back then, she had been happy, bubbly even, the kind of mom that made a home that all of his friends wanted to come to. She always had the best snacks and was always willing to play games and have dance parties and act silly with them in ways that other adults just wouldn’t do. Back in those days, Caleb would often think to himself that his mother hadn’t ever really grown up, not all of the way, at least. When he thought back on it now, he realized that she hadn’t really grown up in that final way adults had until his father had died. His early death had sucked the girlhood out of her and left her with the severity of the most serious and unhappy kinds of adults. It was sort of awful to see and even looking at it now made his heart ache a little. He could still remember how pretty she had been, how happy and full of life. She was still pretty, her hair dark and perfectly groomed, her Chanel suit perfectly fitted to her still-trim body. Her eyes were still that clear, crystal blue that were so striking people would sometimes stop her in the street and comment about them, but there was none of the merriment in them that he remembered seeing as a boy. Instead, they were far away, removed somehow, and at the moment, they were completely full of a cold rage that made him want to hide under his desk until she went away and left him alone.

“What you really meant,” his mother went on, either oblivious to the effect she was having on her son, or seeing it and simply not giving a damn, “is that you’re too busy making up with this...this girl, to take the time to see your own mother. What you’re really saying is that you’re too dense to even realize all of the damage you’re doing to your family, to your reputation.”

“Mom—”

“No! No, Caleb, don’t. Don’t you dare try and tell me that I’m wrong. I’m your mother and I’m never wrong. Do you think I was born yesterday? Do you think I can’t see this trampy-looking woman standing beside you? I assure you, I can. I can see her very clearly, probably far more clearly than you can see her yourself.”

“Ok, woah—” Elsie started to speak, her face darkening and her cheeks flushing crimson. She started to speak, undoubtedly in order to come to her own defense since nobody else seemed to be up to the task, but his mother quickly and neatly cut her off. That was a special talent of his mother’s. She could cut a person off, cut a person down, as efficiently as a seasoned farmer harvesting his crops. It was one of the ways she kept people in line, or at least that was the way she explained herself on the rare occasions when somebody dared to confront her on her behavior. She wasn’t being cruel, wasn’t being a bitch or anything so uncouth as that, but was keeping people in line. Because if she didn’t do it, who would? Just who would, she’d like to know?

“No, ma’am,” his mother spat out now, the amount of vitriol and venom in those words so great it made Caleb’s stomach ache. “Nobody asked you to speak. This is not a conversation for you. You shouldn’t even be here after that display you put on last night. No, this is a conversation between a mother and a son, and one you should have no part in whatsoever.”

As Caleb watched, Elsie’s face went so red it was the color of deeply ripe berries. She opened her mouth, closed it, opened her mouth, and then finally closed it again and folded her arms across her chest tightly. His mother watched this internal battle closely and with narrowed eyes, then nodded to herself with the faintest hint of a smile when it was clear that Elsie wasn’t going to talk back again. That smile was one of triumph, but also of expectations met. It was a smile that said Elsie’s chastised silence was no less than what she had expected all along. Once that was done, once Elsie was neatly dealt with in the manner most common for the formidable Mrs. Grant, she turned back on her son, ready to finish the work she’d so viciously started.

“What I want to know,” she began with a voice so sharp it was a wonder Caleb didn’t start to bleed, “what I really want to know, is why you care so little for the people around you?”

“Mother, I don’t think that’s fair.”

“Fair? You don’t think that’s fair? Well! Would you like to know what I don’t think is fair?

Caleb wanted to tell her that he had no interest in knowing at all, none whatsoever, but the look on her face made it clear that saying something like that might result in actual bodily harm. She was good and riled up now and anything vaguely sarcastic or noncompliant coming from him was only going to make things worse for him. The best thing to do was to just duck his head and wait for it to be over. He knew that, knew it very well. The only question was whether or not he would be able to do it.

“Have you given any thought to the damage you would be doing to the rest of us with your actions? To me? To your brother? Have you any idea what kind of shame you’ve brought down upon our family?”

“I—”

“No, Caleb. No, don’t you interrupt me. You’re going to let me finish, young man. You’re going to let me finish, and when I’ve said my peace, you can just see if you’ve got anything worth saying in response. Am I understood?”

Caleb didn’t answer; he didn’t say a word. Part of the reason he didn’t speak was because that was precisely what she wanted him to do. She wanted him to try and answer back so that she could chastise him all over again. She wanted to dominate, and after her husband’s death, Mrs. Grant had learned to do that through fear and manipulation, through wielding her version of an iron fist. The other reason he didn’t say a word was that he could think of nothing he thought worth trying to get out. He was stunned, but in a dull way, like he was watching somebody else’s fight instead of in one of his own. Because it was ludicrous, really, for her to speak to him this way. Here she was, standing in his office for Christ’s sake, and treating him like he was still a little boy. She was talking to him like he was six years old and had left the icebox door open so that all of the food inside of it spoiled. It was something she did, just one of those quirky things about his mom that he and Marlin had known for years and that nobody ever talked about. The thing that was different this time, was that mom was doing it in front of someone. She hadn’t ever done that before, and it added a whole new level of fucked up to the dynamic between the two of them. Now, she looked at him with narrowing eyes, eyes that looked like they were almost completely pupil and no iris at all. She looked at him with a pinched face ,and while she would never in a million years have cracked her knuckles or even rung her hands—she was far too well-mannered for a thing like that)—her hands were clasped so tightly in front of her that Caleb could see the blood draining out of them so that they looked like they were made out of wax instead of human flesh. He’d seen her like this enough to know that whatever she was going to say next was going to be hard.

“I’ll tell you what’s not fair, young man,” she pressed on, oblivious to the fact that mothers weren’t supposed to call their sons young man by the time they hit thirty. Come to think of it, Caleb wasn’t really sure his mom understood that he was no longer a boy. She certainly didn’t seem to, much to his dislike and borderline dismay. Instead she only continued, her voice sharp and piercing, her methodology a relentless hammering that could really break a man apart.

“I’ll tell you what’s not fair, Caleb Grant. What’s not fair…is the things you’ve been doing to your father’s legacy. What’s not fair… is the things you’re continuing to do to your father’s legacy. Have you even thought about that? Do you ever stop to think about how horrified he would be if he could see you now? The way you live your life, Caleb, it makes me hope there isn’t a heaven above us. At least that way your father won’t have to see what kind of a disappointment you turned out to be.”

Mrs. Grant’s words were followed by such a profound silence it was as if all of the air had been sucked out of the room. Caleb could feel his chest tightening and wondered if it was possible for him to spontaneously develop asthma. Not like he thought his lungs would all of the sudden stop working properly, he wasn’t a complete idiot, but he wondered in a kind of vacant, detached way if maybe he had asthma of the mind or something, if the stress and anger of what his mother had just said to him had sent him completely over the edge. If he had a personal kryptonite, it was his father and that wonderful man’s legacy. The truly shitty thing was that his mother knew it, too. She knew how attached he had been to his father, and she knew him well enough to know that when he allowed himself to think about it, he felt beyond shitty about the way he chose to live versus the way he thought his father would have wanted him to live. Her throwing that in his face now was her choosing to hurt him as badly as she knew how, and it was something he would never be able to forget. Years later, he would think of this moment, this absurdly western-style showdown in his office with Elsie standing by and watching with a look of disgust on her face, and he would feel a ghost of that tightening in his chest. He would feel just a little bit sick, and he would wish he did not know that his mother had that kind of cruelty inside of her mind and her heart. He was defeated. He was hungover and frightened of the way things were so quickly unravelling in his world, and he could not muster up the fight to counter her spiteful words.

“Okay, you need to stop now.”

“Excuse me? I’m sorry, girl, were you actually speaking to me?”

“I definitely was, and I don’t enjoy being called girl. You know, just in case you were curious. You strike me as the type of person who puts a lot of stock in propriety, which would make me think you would call me by name. Or you know, at least ‘miss.’ That would be the very least.”

There was another silence now, but it was a very different kind than they’d just sat through. This silence was thick with uncertainty and Mrs. Grant’s shock at being so directly opposed. Caleb felt an odd bubbling sensation working its way up his throat and realized with a mixture of dismay and humor that he was going to laugh. It wasn’t a question about whether or not he would because he knew that it was going to happen and that the happening was imminent. The only thing for him to do, the only thing he could do, the only thing he had any kind of control over at this point, was how loud he allowed the laughter to be. He thought he might be able to do something about that, although truth be told he wasn’t sure, and so without thinking about what it would look like he clamped both of his hands down over his mouth tightly. He couldn’t see himself, but if he had been able to, he would have seen that he looked like a little boy trying to keep his shit together in the back of a classroom where he had a knack for getting himself in trouble. Frankly, he looked ridiculous, but it helped to keep the laughter to something resembling manageable. Instead of loud, uncontrollable gales, it came out in an awkward little series of hiccups that made him feel even stupider than before. He expected his mom to be angry, furious even, but as far as he could tell, she didn’t recognize that he had made any kind of noise at all. Everything about her was focused on the girl who had dared to stand up to her so blatantly and brazenly. There was a look in her eyes that took him from feeling a childish sense of relief at being spared the wrath of his mother to fearing for Elsie, who had no idea what she was getting herself in for. If she had, there was no way she would actually be taking be taking steps towards the older woman, no way she would be doing anything aside from shrinking back against the wall or maybe even hauling ass out of the office altogether. He felt like it might be best for him to warn her, but he couldn’t seem to make any words come out of his throat. It was locked down tight, rendering him helpless to do anything but sit back and watch the carnage.

“Young lady—”

“Better, but still not awesome. My name is Elsie, in case you’d like to know. My name is Elsie Morrow. You can call me Elsie or Ms. Morrow, if you’re feeling particularly formal.”

“Young lady,” Caleb’s mother continued, her face set with the stubbornness of a child instead of the calm reserve of the late middle-aged people usually found there. “I don’t know what makes you think you have the right to step in between a mother and a son, but you are way off base. Do you hear me? Way off base.”

“You know what? I wouldn’t normally get involved in something like this. I honestly wouldn’t. This is ya’lls deal, and I don’t like to get involved in other people’s things. I wouldn’t normally do it… except that you’re being that awful. I mean like, seriously awful. What kind of mother talks to her son like this? Especially in front of someone she’s never met before? The only thing I can figure is that you’re just looking to humiliate him, which again leads me to ask the question why.”

“Why, I never!”

“Never what? Never thought about what you were doing to your son? Because if that’s the case, you were dead wrong. You’re humiliating him, and I think you know that. What I can’t figure out is why you’re doing it. You must love him, or at least I would hope you do, but you must kind of want to hurt him too, and that’s the part that seems so gross. I’m telling you this because I feel like he deserves to be stood up for, but also because part of me thinks you must not realize how unattractive this is. Because if you did, you couldn’t keep on doing it, right? Because that would mean you didn’t care how you made him feel, and as his mother, that can’t be right. At least I hope it’s not right.”

“I don’t know what kind family you were brought up in,” Caleb’s mom hissed, her head moving forward as she did so and giving Caleb the impression of a viper getting ready to strike, “but in this family, in all good families, I believe, it’s known that speaking back to your elders is not to be tolerated.”

“Yeah, I was raised that way too. I guess it didn’t take. The way I see it, you stand up for someone when he’s being bullied, and it doesn’t so much matter if the person doing the bullying is your elder or not. And just so you know, he is doing something about it. About the hacking and the gossip, I mean. He’s got someone working on it and that someone is going to get to the bottom of this mess if it kills her. So… if that’s what you’re worried about, that and your legacy, you needn’t be.”

Caleb could only sit and watch, utterly fascinated by the standoff taking place between his mother and his fake girlfriend. He watched the looks on both of their faces and saw that, unbelievably, his mother’s resolve was wavering. She looked like she had been slapped in the face, and the force of it had been too much for her to take. The way Elsie was talking to her was something his mother would have lumped into the category of “fighting dirty”—and she wasn’t used to handling things like that. She was used to being the one who did the talking dirty, not the one who had to be on the receiving end of it. Her lips quivered and her right eye began to twitch so that for one terrible moment in time, a moment in time that felt to Caleb like it was frozen and would never move jerk forward again, Caleb was sure she was going to cry. The last time he had seen that happen had been at his father’s funeral and that had been a very long time ago. When she finally spoke again, she seemed to have lost much of that vitriolic fight that had so long been her calling card. Her voice wavered in a way that must have infuriated her but that she nonetheless seemed powerless to control. Her eyes were glassy and darted from Elsie to Caleb and then back to Elsie again. Perhaps she was waiting for something, Caleb would think to himself later on when he’d had time to process the shit show in his office, perhaps she was waiting for him to come to her defense. If that was it, she would have been waiting for a hell of a long time because he was too floored by having somebody stand up for him and to his mother to do much of anything at all.

“I can see that there’s no reasoning with you,” she spoke to Caleb and Caleb alone, “and if you think I’ll just stand here and suffer whatever abuses you feel inclined to lob in my direction, you’ve got another thing coming. But I’ll tell you this much, and I hope you listen. I very much hope you do. Because I’ll not stand for you driving this family into the ground. Do you hear me? I won’t do it. Even your brother never brought this kind of shame down upon the Grant name, and he’s spent the last decade and a half completely without direction. But a little birdy told me that he’s finally taken a vested interest in the company, finally taken on the role you allotted him as a legitimate one, and that means you don’t have the same kind of pull you once did. If you’re not very careful, you may just lose everything you’ve worked for, boy. You may lose it to your very own brother.”

She turned on her heel then and walked out of the room, even the sound of her heels hitting the floor sounding discontented. Caleb heard his poor, unsuspecting secretary try to say something along the lines of a cheerful goodbye and then get her head verbally ripped off of the rest of her body, and winced a little. Then he turned and looked at Elsie, who was looking at him with a look of mild shock. They stayed that way for a moment, just looking into each other’s eyes, then burst into laughter. It was good to laugh, maybe the only thing to do at that moment, but beneath the surface of that laughter Caleb heard a mania that sounded an awful lot like fear.