Chapter Four
Jackson
"Yes, please. Thank you."
The waitress took my empty glass from my hand and hurried away to bring me a fresh one. She was one of the better of the staff of the Club, pretty in a pleasant and unassuming way, and capable of blending in seamlessly with the rest of the environment of the highly exclusive organization so that she was at once at the beck and call of any of the wealthy, powerful members of the Club and unobtrusive in the atmosphere. I knew for a fact that Talon had already slept with her a few times. He reported her as being efficient and pleasing, exactly as she was in her job and a satisfactory stand-in when he couldn't find a new or more exciting woman to bed for the night.
Where we were sitting now she wouldn't have to worry about attending to any other members. This was a private section of the aged facility set aside for the use of my family. It had been this way for several generations since the lavish, luxurious building was new and largely built on the back of my family's payroll. Here my brothers and I relaxed when we wanted to be away from home, taking advantage of the amenities of the Club and often using our time here to network and further build on the legacy of the family. Right now, though, we were sitting around the polished ebony table in the middle of the room and I was watching the reflection of the nearby fire in its surface while the four of us engaged in an annual tradition that none of us looked forward to.
"No, we did that last year," Lucas said.
"So?" Aiden asked.
"Each year has to be different. It's the tradition. You know that. Dad made sure it was distinct each year."
"You know what would be totally different this year? If we didn't do it at all."
I glared at the youngest brother.
"That's not an option. Our family has been hosting the Valentine's Day gala for as long as it had been held here. Generations. We can't just decide this year that we aren't going to do it. We owe it to Dad and Grandpa, and everyone before them to make sure that we continue on with their tradition. Besides, there are only two weeks left until Valentine's Day. Everyone is expecting the gala to go on exactly as it always has. There's no way to just not do it."
Even Aiden had to agree with me. Hosting the gala wasn't something that any of us really loved to do, but we did it because our father did, and his father before him. They had started it as a way for the families of the Club to socialize and enjoy time together, but also as a wedding celebration for one of the original founders. It served as an anniversary party for decades and after their death continued on as one of the favorite social events of the Club members. Our family had always hosted it, with the responsibility falling on us after our father died. Though we were never thrilled at the prospect of another gala coming, we always did our best to create the best experience for those who cared so much about it. This year, though, we were struggling to focus on planning. Our minds were on the reading of the will looming over us. The next day was Talon's birthday and though we had planned a party for him in the evening, the lawyer would be arriving first thing in the morning to read the rest of the will. I vacillated between feeling optimistic, like we would finally get hold of the rest of what was owed to us, and getting the sinking, miserable feeling that Talon's birthday would start with finding out that we had been blocked from the rest of the estate.
I couldn't stop thinking about what would happen to everything if it didn't come to us. The money, the properties, ownership of the business. There was no other family to inherit it, and though our father had some close friends, there were none that I would consider so close that it was justifiable for them to inherit anything from him. The thought of our family's legacy being broken up and scattered was intolerable to me, and I knew that my brothers felt the same way. There was nothing that we could do about it, though. Until we had heard the rest of the will, we didn't even know what our father had planned, and even then, there was little that we could do to try to change it. He was nothing if not a thorough and intelligent man and ensured that there were several failsafes and no-contest clauses to ensure that exactly what he had put down on paper was what would be done. We were at the mercy of whatever the lawyer told us the next day.
"We always do a banquet," Talon said, bringing me back into the conversation of the gala that had been going on around me as I lost myself in my thoughts. "Why don't we try something different this year?"
"Different like what?" Aiden asked.
Talon shrugged.
"I don't know," he said. "But the thought of another multi-course meal with a bunch of people sitting around at little tables having inane conversations sounds suffocating. The gala is supposed to be a social event, isn't it? So should we plan something that actually gets people talking and enjoying themselves?"
I thought about what he said. When we were younger most of the members of the Club were elderly, but there had been a shift in recent years. While we were still among the youngest of the members, particularly considering that we didn't have parents there to act as the established members above us, the overall age of those who spent their time there had lowered. Maybe they would be more open to a change in the gala that went beyond just changing the overall theme, decorations, and entertainment.
"Everyone expects us to do something a little bit different every year," I said. "Up until now, that has meant serving a different menu and having different music. We would change the decorations and sometimes the layout of the room, but we've never done anything totally different. I think that really changing things up might be good for the Club."
"What do you have in mind?" Lucas asked.
I looked at him and he seemed to have the same thought that I did. He nodded.
"What?" Talon asked.
"Who says that we have to have dinner at all?" I asked. "Like you said, this is supposed to be a social event. So why don't we serve something that gets people up and interacting with each other?"
"Like what?"
"Like chocolates."
"You know the chocolates that Jackson brought home and then sent to the client?" Lucas asked.
"Yeah, they raved about them," Aiden said.
I nodded.
"The shop that sells them is just a little boutique shop. I've only ever seen the owner and one other woman there. I think that that's all that works there. It's small and it's never busy. I'm sure that she would have the time to make enough chocolates for the gala, especially since we have plenty of time to give her notice."
"Do you really think that two weeks is plenty of time?" Talon asked.
"I'm sure it will be if we pay her enough," I said. "Besides, every time that I've gone in there her display case is full and she always seems ready to make more. If we make it worth her while, I'm sure that she'll be willing to take the time off that she needs to come up with the flavors and make as many as we need."
"We can go talk to her," Lucas offered. "Jackson and I can see what she thinks about it and if she has any ideas."
"That sounds good," Talon said.
"We'll find some time after your birthday," I said.
The four of us left the Club that night feeling slightly more optimistic about the gala, but the thought of the reading the next morning was still weighing heavily on me. I tried not to think about it that night when I went to bed, but I found myself staring at the ceiling, wondering what my father had been thinking when he wrote his will. None of us knew when he drew up the final document. We all assumed that he had at least a cursory will in place from the time that Talon was born. That was just the type of man that he was. He would want to make sure that his wife and son were properly taken care of if something were to happen to him. He had no way of knowing that the end of his life would come when his wife was already gone and he had four sons to consider. I wondered how much his final wishes changed when he found out that he was sick. He had always been healthy and strong, and when I was younger I thought that he was invincible. Finding out that the end of his life was coming far sooner than any of us could have anticipated hit me hard, but I couldn't imagine what it had made him feel. In an instant he went from feeling like he still had most of his life ahead of him, plenty of time to ensure that each of us was ready to live our own lives without his constant guidance, to knowing that, far too soon, he would be leaving us and we would be fending for ourselves in the world.
It wasn't as though he thought he would be leaving us incapable of taking care of ourselves or without anything that we needed to thrive. But I could only imagine that he wondered if he had prepared us enough and if he had done enough as our father to ensure we could live a life that would mean more than just existence. That thought could have been enough to make him change the will that he already had in place, to change the plans that he had put down for us in an effort to continue to guide, and even control us, well after he was gone.
While that made sense to me, it still wasn't enough to tell me what that change might have been made or if it was that change that made him hold back some of our inheritance. Had that been something that he had always intended, or something that came to mind only after he had learned that he was sliding toward his last breath?
When I finally fell asleep that night it was fitful, bringing flashes of dreams that were almost frantically paced and seemed to border between memories and images my brain was constructing just to fill the void. My eyes were open again when the alarm went off and I climbed out of bed, barely processing that I was awake as I went directly into the shower. I was making coffee when my brothers came into the kitchen one by one, Talon arriving last.
"Happy birthday," I said, handing him a mug as he came in.
Talon grunted and gulped the coffee down black.
"Old age sure has made his disposition more cheerful," Aiden said.
The first of us to step out of our twenties, Talon seemed to be taking the milestone exactly as I would expect him to. Turning thirty didn't seem to matter to him, changing nothing about his life or the way that he would approach it other than the box that he might check on paperwork.
"Did Mr. Dandridge say when he was going to be here?" Lucas asked.
As soon as he said it, the doorbell rang.
"Apparently now," Talon said.
I looked at each of my brothers, feeling like we were in the last moment of our lives as we knew them. For five years we had lived with questions, wondering how this was going to unfold. It had become our normal, our reality. Now it was about to change and whichever way it went, we were never going to be back in this moment, in this reality. We guzzled our coffee and left the mugs scattered around the kitchen as we headed for the study.
Talon
The lawyer was standing in the study by the time that the four of us got there. His briefcase was already in place on the desk and he was holding the will in his hands, offering a hint of a smile as we walked in. I didn't like that smile. It seemed to be holding something, relaying some kind of message that he wasn't putting into words. For the first time, I realized that he knew what was in the second portion of the will. I didn't know why that hadn't occurred to me until now, but when I realized it, I felt a surge of both anger and concern. Our father's personal lawyer from before I was born, Mr. Dandridge had never been particularly fond of me or my brothers. Though he had always kept himself appropriately professional in his dealings with us, it was clear that he thought that the four of us were indulged and fairly useless. He didn't think that we worked hard enough and seemed faintly resentful of our lifestyle. That smile told me that whatever he was about to read to us felt to him like vindication, and I could only assume that would have negative repercussions for us.
"Good morning, gentlemen," he said. "And a happy birthday to you, Talon."
"Thank you," I said.
"Well," he continued. "We've been waiting five long years to see if this day was going to be necessary, and now we are here. Are all of you ready to hear the rest of your father's will?"
"We've been ready for five years," Aiden snapped.
The youngest brother, Aiden hadn't even turned 18 yet when our father died. For several months, I was his official guardian, doing my best to help him through the last stretch before he became a legal adult. Though I didn't know how much of an influence I had actually had on him, I still felt a sense of protectiveness over him. The greater age difference between him and the rest of us meant that he had lived differently, never knowing our mother and experiencing a different version of our father. He was so much stronger now, the years that had passed hardening him and maturing him, but I sometimes wondered if he would be different if our father hadn't died. The thought was still stinging in the back of my mind that all of this could culminate in us not getting the rest of our inheritance, or even in being cut out even further. If that happened, I might be to blame. It could be because of me and the choices that I had made. Maybe I could have done better for them. Maybe I could have prevented this from happening.
"Talon, Jackson, Lucas, and Aiden," Mr. Dandridge began. "If you are hearing this, it means that it is Talon's thirtieth birthday. Happy birthday, my firstborn. I wish that I could be there celebrating with you."
I listened as the lawyer read the letter that our father had written to us introducing the second part of the will. It expressed that he loved us and only wanted the best for us, explaining that that was why he had made the considerations that he had. This was how he wanted to protect us, to encourage us to live the life that he knew we should. Finally, it was time for the actual reading. As soon as Mr. Dandridge began reading it, I felt like my mind closed and I was no longer actually hearing his voice. Instead, the words were just forming in my brain, cutting through me. When the lawyer finished, he looked up at us. That smile was back and now I understood exactly why it was there.
"Do you have any questions?" he asked.
"Just one," I said, standing from the couch where I had been sitting.
"Yes?"
"Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Excuse me?" he asked, sounding offended and completely taken aback.
"I'm sorry," Jackson said, standing and coming to my side. "I really do have to forgive my older brother. He's under a lot of stress. His birthday and all, you know. What I'm sure what he meant to say was… are you fucking kidding us?"
Mr. Dandridge's eyes widened and he shoved the papers back into his briefcase, snapping it closed.
"I assure you I'm not kidding you. I was with your father personally when he drew up this section of the will. I helped him with the wording to ensure that it was properly binding."
"Of course, you did," Aiden said.
"Let me just go over this one more time to make sure that I heard it correctly," Lucas said. "We have to get married?"
"That's not what it says," I corrected. "We have to have a baby."
"You don't have to," the lawyer said. "There's no requirement."
"Oh, no, of course, not," I said. "Just if we want to inherit the rest of the money or the properties or own the business."
"Your father wanted to ensure that your lives were more than just indiscriminate relationships and indulgence."
I had never wanted to hit someone as much as I wanted to Mr. Dandridge in that moment. He looked at us with such a smug expression, as though he had been waiting literally our entire lives to watch the world that was built around us crumble. In that moment I couldn't understand why my father had trusted him so much over the years or why he would have chosen him to be the one to handle his most personal and important matters.
"So if we want our inheritance, we have to have a child?" I asked. "Each of us has to have a baby before getting the property, money, or interest in the business that our father set aside?"
"Not exactly," he said.
He was inches away from talking in riddles and part of me was waiting for him to whip out a scavenger hunt of feats that we had to accomplish, siring a child being only the final step.
"What do you mean?" Lucas asked.
"The will specifies that there can be no further distribution of the estate until there is an heir."
"But he had it read on Talon's birthday. That has to mean that he expects Talon to have a child and receive his portion, and then so on," Aiden said.
"No," the lawyer answered, shaking his head. "Today was chosen only because the thirtieth birthday is a milestone that usually marks the beginning of a more established adulthood. By this point, your father hoped that at least one of you would have produced a child, someone to hold the future of the family. The will itself doesn't specify who must fulfill the requirement or even that all of you must. It only says that the estate will not be distributed any further without an heir. Once it has been distributed, each of you will be responsible for passing your portion on to your child to do with as they please, and then they will pass it along from there, ensuring that the legacy continues.
"But none of us are married. We don't even have girlfriends. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find more than two or three women in all who one of us has slept with more than once. None of us have any prospects for the mother of a child."
"That's not my problem," the lawyer said. "Until there is someone to carry on the legacy of the Griffin family, the inheritance will stay as it is. That means that control of the company will remain with the board and without a direct owner, more power will switch to them. The properties will remain inaccessible. The money will continue to sit in trust. If there comes a time when it becomes clear that there will be no heir from any of you, the held assets will be distributed to charities and given over to a controlling body."
I felt my blood run cold. This man was threatening not just to not give us access to the money, property, and business, but to take what our family had built, dissolve it, and scatter it. The things that mattered to us the most, including the business, would be taken away and handed over to people who had no link to it and would never be able to show it the respect that it deserved. The lawyer looked at each of us expectantly, as if waiting for more questions, then gathered his belongings and walked out of the house without another word. The door closing seemed louder than it ever had and I waited until the trembling of it had moved through me before I turned to my brothers.
"What are we supposed to do now?" I asked.
"This has to be some sort of sick joke," Aiden said.
Jackson shook his head.
"It's not a joke," he said. "Remember how much dad used to talk about the families that we would have in the future? He's talked about how much he looked forward to being a grandfather and teaching the next generation about the business and the family. When he found out that he was dying, he must have thought about the grandchildren that he never got to see and wanted to make sure that they actually did exist at some point.”
"But why?" Aiden asked. "What's the point of forcing us into having children?"
"He's not forcing us," I said.
I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, trying to release the tension and headache that had suddenly formed there.
"Yes, he is."
"No," I said. "He's not forcing us to do anything. He's just saying that if we want the rest of the estate, we have to wait until we have children, if we do. That's our choice. He wanted to make sure that his legacy passed down through generations, if that wasn't going to happen, he needed to make other arrangements."
As much as I hated it, I could understand the decision that my father made. His family and the legacy that they had left for him meant everything to my father. It had meant everything to his father before him and to his father before him. There had always been the fear of what would happen if there wasn't another generation to carry on and plans had to be made to ensure that what have been created would be properly protected.
"I don't know about any of you," Lucas said. "But I have no interest in getting married and having a child."
"Neither do I," Aiden said. "I'm perfectly happy with my life exactly the way it is."
"I'm not even thinking about that," Jackson said. "I'm thinking about what would happen to the business and the estate if we did have children."
"What do you mean?" Lucas asked.
"It would be divided," I said, understanding where my brother was going with this.
Jackson nodded.
"Just like it said in the will, if each of us had a child, our portion of the inheritance would go to that child or however many children we had. When they grew up, what they will have would be passed down to their children and so on. Everything would be split up so much that it wouldn't be long before it was unrecognizable. Inevitably there would be arguments and clashes over how to run the business or who was allowed to use what piece of property. It would shatter the family."
"That's the last thing I want," I said.
"It doesn't look like there's anything that we can do about it," Jackson said. "We have to make a decision. Either we have children and we just deal with what would happen in future generations, or we face the consequences of not having control over the entire estate."
I looked into the faces of my brothers. All held expressions of anger, frustration, and sadness. This couldn't have been the intention that our father had when he made the will. He couldn't have anticipated the turmoil that it would have caused. But here we were now and it seems that there was nothing we could do.
Happy birthday to me.
Lucas
After the reading on the morning of Talon's birthday, the four of us had drowned our misery at his party, leaving the house scattered with empty glasses, strands of ribbon, and discarded panties. The next two days we had spent losing ourselves completely in our work, trying as hard as we could not to think about the will. None of us mentioned it. In fact, we barely spoke. I was perfectly willing to continue on with that pattern of denial when I woke up on Saturday, but when I walked into the kitchen to get coffee and saw Talon, I knew that I couldn't. He was biting through one of the few remaining chocolates from his party and chasing it with black coffee, and I realized that in trying to ignore the issue with the will, and the fact that we had no idea what we were going to do, we had also managed to forget that we had other obligations as well.
"Shit," I said, swallowing down the coffee and dropping the mug into the sink.
"Well, it's maybe not the best," Talon said. "I think that Betsy switched the type of beans that she buys. But it's not that bad."
I sighed as I looked at my oldest brother. He was staring down into the inky coffee as though contemplating why our loyal cook would perform such an act of treachery against us.
"Not the coffee," I said. "We have to get ourselves out of this funk and move forward."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Yeah, we're all a little pissed off about this whole heir thing, but there's nothing we can do about it at this exact moment. Dandridge said that there's no timeline, so there's no point in trying to rush through it or think that it needs to happen right now. We have to keep up with our other obligations."
"Shit, the gala."
"And there it is. You've caught up."
The sleepiness that had been in his eyes was now replaced by the intensity that was usually there.
"How are we supposed to put this thing together? We are down to a week now and we haven't made any arrangements. We haven't even announced it at the Club."
"We're going to have to get our asses in gear."
"Alright. You go talk to the woman about the chocolates. She's going to have to work fast, but we'll make it an attractive prospect for her. I'm going to get in touch with the Club and start making arrangements and ensure that the announcement goes out today. But first I'm going to go drag our lazy brothers out of bed so that they can do something useful, too."
A few minutes later Jackson came into the kitchen looking distinctly pissed off and I figured that Talon had likely gone for the literal route and actually dragged him out of the bed. He didn't say a word to me as he filled his coffee mug and downed it twice, then headed back to his bedroom. Just before he walked out of the room he made a gesture toward me that I assumed meant that he would be back in a few minutes, letting me know that he was going to come along with me to talk to Gabrielle.
Nearly an hour later we walked up to the door of the shop. We looked through the glass and saw Gabrielle leaned over at the display case, arranging trays filled with shimmering chocolates. The sign on the door still said that the shop was closed even though it was a few hours past the opening time listed on the hours. I felt bad at the indication that her business wasn't doing well, but at the same time, this made me more optimistic that she would be able and willing to take our offer. I glanced to the side and saw Jackson smiling as he looked in at Gabrielle.
"Happy to see her?" I asked.
"Of course, I am," he said. "Look at her. Aren't you glad to get a glimpse of that to start your day?"
I realized that I was happy to be at the shop again too. Even though I had only been here once before, I enjoyed having a chance to be here again, even if it was only to get a look at her in her tight little uniform.
"She would make a nice little Valentine's Day treat."
"Maybe after we pull off the gala, we can enjoy a bit of a celebration of our own."
I was nodding in agreement when Gabrielle straightened and noticed us standing there. She looked startled, but then she smiled. Closing the display case, she crossed the lobby to the door and unlocked it.
"Good morning, guys," she said as she opened the door.
"Barely morning," Jackson said playfully as he stepped inside.
"Well," she said with a shrug, "perks of owning a business. I get to decide when it's morning."
"I'm not sure that's how it works," I said.
She grinned and walked back up to the counter, but didn't go behind it.
"Don't tell me that you've already gotten through all of those chocolates already," she said.
"Almost," I said, "but that's not why we're here."
Her smile faltered slightly.
"Oh. Is there something I can do for you?"
"Actually, there is," Jackson said.
"OK."
She sounded hesitant and I couldn't help but notice the hint of color that had crept onto her cheeks and lightly flushed her chest. I wondered what was going through her mind and my stomach clenched slightly at the thoughts that appeared in mine.
"We're planning a Valentine's Day party. We've hosted dinners in previous years, but this year we thought that we would go with a different approach and try more of a cocktail party feel. It's Valentine's Day, so of course, we want to do chocolate, and that made us think of you."
Her eyes widened slightly and I saw her look between Jackson and me a few times. She looked almost as though she had heard what Jackson and I wanted to do with her, and I could only hope that she would agree to provide the treats for the party first, and for us after.