“Sit down.”

My father points towards one of the low stools in front of his desk. I take a seat and I’m forced to look up at him. I know the setup is deliberate; his high-backed leather chair raises him far above anyone who sits down in the stool, so that he looms like a hawk over its prey.

Just a few minutes ago my head was spinning from the feel of Hailey pressed against me, from the smell of her, the way she trembled under my touch. Now, though, I’m weighed down by the frustration and anger that sit heavy as rocks in my stomach.

“You’ve been here over a week now, Jordan. I want to talk about your performance.”

I grit my teeth, braced for a barrage of criticism.

“I’ve had a few people keeping an eye on you, and asked them to speak with your team,” he continues. “There have been...comments. Ludo has told me—”

I cut him off. “If Ludo told you anything about me and—”

My voice dies in my throat when I see the expression on my father’s face. His ice blue eyes narrow to steely slits, and when he speaks, he uses a low voice that’s threatening enough to raise hairs on the back of my neck.

“Do not interrupt me when I am speaking.”

He pauses for a moment, then leans onto his elbows and folds his hands under his chin. “Ludo has told me you’ve had a strong start. Your team has been exceedingly productive since you arrived. While I’ve been given some details on what it is you’ve done to gain their respect—”

He stops and raises an eyebrow, as if daring me to interrupt him again. I grip the edge of the stool but stay silent.

“I quite frankly do not care what you do, so long as it means you get your job done and get it done well. There are still doubts within the company about your ability to handle the role. I will not stand to have my son seen as a spineless imbecile, and if this is the way you have chosen to assert yourself, so be it. I expect you to continue giving me the same sort of results. You know what’s at stake if you don’t.”

He flips open a file on his desk and starts to read, signaling that I should go. I get up, blood pounding in my ears, and he calls out to me just as I’m about to open the door.

“Oh and Jordan,” he says, eyes still on the file, “your mother will be glad to know you’re doing well here.”

Mom...

The word is a gust of wind rushing through my mind, overturning scattered memories that shift in and out of focus as I make my way to my office.

The padding of slippers coming down the stairs. A soft hand ruffling my hair. Thin, silk-clad shoulders hunched over the bathroom sink, shaking with sobs. The hospital...

I slam a fist against my office window. It’s too late to fight it, though; the memory washes over me, dragging me under.

Everything in the waiting room seems distant, the voices around me sounding tinny, like I’m hearing them from the bottom of a well. Dad is arguing with a nurse a few feet away. He’s shouting and waving his arms, a blur of motion in the corner of my vision. I’ve never seen him so out of control. I hunch over and rest my head between my knees, fighting the urge to throw up. I’ve felt the burn of bile at the back of my throat ever since the doctor called us aside and told us to expect the worst.

I turn away from the window, swallowing down the same acrid taste as I did that day, the same one I feel rising in me every time I relive those moments.

I sit down at my desk to steady myself and start to clear a few papers away. I find my folder of app designs and flip through the pages, looking at all the logos and log in screens. I’d only ever shown them to a handful of people, design school friends I cut out of my life as soon as I found out I’d be working here, but everyone said they were good.

I drop the folder into my briefcase to take home at the end of the day. I don’t even know why I brought the designs here in the first place.

After I finish clearing the desk, I open up a spreadsheet and spend the next few hours plugging in numbers, compiling a report I need to hand in to Ludo tomorrow morning. I notice a few errors in the data and check to see who was responsible for getting it to me.

Letting out a sigh, I shoot Tod Rochester a message asking him to come to my office. He knocks at the door a few minutes later and I tell him to come in.

“Jordan! Boss man!”

“Hello, Tod.” I gesture for him to bring the spare chair over to my desk and have a seat. “I just wanted to go over this spending data you gave me.”

I point out the issues and give him some corrections on what he’s been doing wrong. His tanned features look put off by the criticism, and he starts running a hand over his spiky, gelled hair.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, boss,” he says, one knee bouncing up and down. “Won’t happen again.”

He seems so rattled by the conversation that I decide to try perking him up a bit. I bring up the only interest of his that I’m aware of.

“So, um, any new...women?”

A wide smile lights up his face, and he reaches over to punch my arm.

What is it with people around here and hitting me?

“That’s what I’m talking about, boss,” he says. “That’s the boss man I know. Have you seen the new receptionist?”

I nod, even though I haven’t. “Yeah, she’s uh, pretty hot.”

“Pretty hot? She’s like Sports Illustrated hot!”

I give a feeble “Heh, Sports Illustrated,” in response, but Tod is laughing too loudly at his own comment to notice that my reaction is less than uproarious.

He gets up to go, still chuckling, and I remind him about the corrections before he leaves and forgets why he was even here in the first place.

“So Tod, while you’re thinking about those new”—I suppress a shudder and force the next word out— “jugs, just don’t forget the input instructions.”

“Right boss!” he calls from the door. “Second column, not the third! I’ll have those new pages for you by the end of the day.”

He closes the door behind him and I slump down in my chair, letting my head loll back.

As totally fucked up as it may be, furthering my reputation as a disciple of Ludo’s misogyny is looking like the most effective way of doing well here. I have no other common ground with my staff, and seeing as almost all of them are more experienced than I am, it’s a wonder I’ve managed to gain their respect at all. Until a better option presents itself, I might as well go with the one that already seems to be working. Would it really be the end of the world if a few sexists thought I was a sexist too?

But Hailey...

Just the thought of her has me lost in the memory of this morning, in her ink blue eyes staring up at me. Feeling the way her body curved under my hand, it was all I could do not to rip the apron off of her and strip her out of her blouse right there in the boardroom.

Luckily I didn’t, given Ludo’s inconvenient entrance a few seconds later, which just goes to show how impossible it would be for things to continue between her and I without the entire office knowing. I try to come up with a mental list of reasons to stay away from her. Given the reputation I’ve been gaining, anything I do to move things forward between us would feel like it was done on false pretences. I’d be letting people believe things that aren’t true just by being seen with her, and while I’m willing to sacrifice my own integrity, I couldn’t do the same to her.

The sounds of the hospital fill my head again. Whatever I feel for Hailey, what my dad said in his office is true; I know exactly what’s at stake if I fail. I think back on the day I showed up in my mom’s room and she wasn’t there. No one could tell me where she’d been taken, so I went after my father to find out.

* * *

“Where is she, dad?”

I’m standing in the living room of my parents’ condo, a few feet away from my father. The flush of an autumn sunset coats the multimillion dollar view of the city outside, but the display is wasted on us. We stand with our eyes locked on one another, muscles tensed like predators braced for an attack.

“That’s not information you need to know.”

“She’s my mother,” I spit. “You can’t keep my away from my own mother.”

“You’re not healthy for her, Jordan.”

His voice is as calm as ever. It infuriates me to see that he can still meet my gaze while spouting this bullshit.

“How can you say this is my fault?”

He takes a step closer towards me. “You know this is your fault, Jordan. You already recognize the truth. Now do what you can to fix it before it’s too late.”

He seems to grow taller as his threat looms over me.

“No,” I say, but even I can hear the resolve in my voice falter. “I won’t let you do this. I’ll find her.”

“I’m the head of one of the nation’s most successful security companies, Jordan. If I don’t want you to get to her, you won’t.

I take a step backwards and my father advances, his hawk-like eyes narrowed, as determined as a bird of prey going in for the kill.

“You knew what your mother suffered. You knew exactly what kind of upheaval you would throw her into when you decided to toss aside everything we ever gave you to for the sake of some inane whim. If you ever want to have even the chance of seeing her again, you will do exactly as I tell you from this moment on.”

He’s won. He’s got me in a chokehold now and he knows it.

All my life, I’ve been told that my mother is fragile. My father inherited a corporate dynasty from his family; my mother got dangerously high blood pressure from hers.

I knew the meaning of the word ‘aneurysm’ by the time I was eight years old. Some of my earliest memories are of being told to stop crying because it would disturb her and make her feel worse. Every slip up, every instance of misbehaviour I ever showed, was always punished with a reminder that when I did something bad, I made my mother stressed. When she was stressed, she got sick.

I let my father use her as an excuse for everything he made me do, until after twenty-four years I got tired of being manipulated. I called his bluff. I turned my back on the job he gave me at the company and sent my application off to design school. For eight months, my mother was fine.

Then I got the call. She’d had a stroke.

Standing a few feet from my father, I drop my eyes and nod my head.

“Your mother needs stability,” he intones, his voice rising as the words issue out of him like thunder. “You will give her that by following the plan she and I set out for you. You will move back to this city. You will live where I tell you to. You will drive the car I tell you to. You will do the job I give you in my company, and you will do it as well as my son and the holder of an MBA I personally financed can be expected to do.”

I continue to nod as the ground seems to crumble away from under my feet, leaving me in a bottomless freefall.

“If you are successful enough, and if by some miracle your mother’s health recovers from the damage you have done, then, and only then, will I allow you to see her again. Do you understand?”

I think of my mother, of her frail shoulders that were always wrapped in satin or silk. She floated through my childhood, more of a fairy godmother to me than a living, breathing parent who did ordinary things like feed me or pick out my clothes. To me she was the soft whisper of a kiss on my cheek, the patter of slippers disappearing up the stairs. She was light and shadow and a sweet cloud of perfume still clinging to the air once she’d gone.

“Yes,” I tell my father. “I understand.”

He heads across the vast living room, towards the stairs that lead to the second floor.

“I expect you to leave by this evening and start arranging your move. Your new address will be ready soon.”

He disappears up the stairs, and I take a few shaky steps towards the panorama windows. The colours of the sunset have deepened now. The sky looks like it’s bleeding.