I’m in the office, sitting at my desk and trying to figure out how to get things moving with the business without folding. I have around six months before the IRS starts knocking on my door asking to collect taxes. I’m not even sure how to approach it with Karen and Colt anymore. I feel as if there’s pressure from all sides at the moment, and I'm getting mixed signals.

I’ve been getting up early and avoiding Karen like the plague. I should've never fucking slept with her. I felt alive for the first time in a long time, but as I got up the next day, I only felt guilty.

"Yes, Janice what’s up?" I ask my secretary as she buzzes my intercom.

"Mr. Morgan, I have the IRS calling me. This is the second time today that they’ve called," she says and pauses. I sigh. I can tell that the feds are circling. "We’ve also just gotten notice from the Carter Jeffries folks that they’re pulling their funds out."

Fuck. I just lost another client.

Janice hangs up before I can even reply. She’s fed up and she knows exactly what’s going on. This business is folding by the minute. Traders are leaving like water from a sieve. The office just seems emptier every day and to make matters worse, I have the IRS sniffing around.

I decide that I need to be a man. The type of person I used to be before Clara made me feel so small. I didn’t know how to tell Karen the truth. Marrying her mom was the worst mistake ever. She used me like some kind of trophy and then when she was done she dumped me like a piece of trash.

Honesty is the best policy in this case, and I’m just kidding myself to think otherwise. I need that money, otherwise there’s no point coming back here tomorrow. The business is going to fold or even worse I could end up in jail.

I send a message to both of them:

I sit with the phone in my hand, hoping that they’ll respond and tell me that they want to meet up. I think that it’s better to meet on neutral ground rather than meeting in the house. Maybe that was my first mistake. The house reminds both of them of their mothers. Karen was feeling vulnerable knowing that the last time she saw Clara was in that house. Before that, whenever Clara went missing, I would wake up in the morning, and a few of her things would be gone. A week or two later she would turn up at the house as if nothing happened.

This time was different; she left and made it clear that she wasn’t coming back in a hurry. The previous week, after the police had called and told me that they’d found her on the street trying to sell her body for tricks to get drugs, I knew that things were going to get worse. She couldn’t get her hands on the money because the State of California had declared her unfit. And honestly, the rules of the trust were simple. If she couldn’t stay clean, then the courts had to follow the will of the trust set up by her folks.

I thought being blocked from the banks would help Clara. I thought that it would get her on the mend. But when she started to try and find out other ways to get money, that’s when I knew that Clara cared about no one but herself. It didn’t seem to bother her that her only daughter could find her on the streets, looking to suck cock for coke.

It didn’t deter her that her husband had threatened to leave her if she didn’t clean up. That’s right. There was only so much I could fucking take.

If anything, the more I tried to help her, the worse she seemed to get. This was when I took my heart back. I couldn’t keep giving it to someone who didn’t deserve it.

Suddenly, my phone vibrates and I receive a message from both Colt and Karen. If I didn’t know any better, I would've thought that they were together.

I expected Colt to tell me that he wasn’t coming, but instead, he only said "sure." Never mind, I should be happy that at least this time we’ll be on neutral ground and able to talk like adults, instead of fighting like animals. If I hadn’t been so weak the other day, we would've gone after each other. Luckily I was too tired that day to do more than shout.

I’ve got my credit card that I can use to pay for the dinner tonight, which is more than I’ll be able to do in a few weeks’ time if the IRS freezes my accounts. I need to tell them exactly what’s happening and the extent of it, before it’s too late. We’re all consenting adults; we just need to behave like it, or at least I need to. After all, it’s my job as their father.