Chapter 1

Tyler

The sunlight from the August afternoon streamed into the conference room, glinting against the expensive watch I’d chosen for just this meeting. I’d thought about it, practiced my handshake and sensed the other partners would look down and understand that once and for all, I was the ‘somebody’ they’d been searching for. On this day, I, Tyler Renner, was becoming a partner of the downtown Raleigh, North Carolina tech firm, Dalton.

It was something my career had been working toward for years.

Samantha, the HR girl from the San Francisco office, leaned heavily across the table as she read me my contract, stating the pay rate, and the hours required out west. As she pushed forward, her breasts craned high on the desk, cresting over the soft white blouse she wore beneath the business jacket. Her bright blonde hair flashed as she re-adjusted in her seat, giving me a smile.

“Does everything sound all right so far, Tyler?” she asked. A bit of gum snuck out from the left side of her teeth.

“So far, so good,” I said.

I sensed I had an effect on her. My sheer dominance in the conference room made her shuffle in her seat, made her more flirtatious and eager to please. Reaching to the left, she poured us each a glass of whiskey from an expensive, barrel-aged bottle and then passed one to me. As we clinked our glasses together, she winked at me and said, “I think we’re going to have a wonderful time working together, Tyler. I’m in many of the meetings out in California. They have me take the minutes of the meetings. So I might not have this tech brain that you have in there, but I certainly know the lingo. And I always pour the drinks.”

I sipped the whiskey slowly, allowing it to pour over my tongue. What was Samantha suggesting? Certainly, it was sexual. Her words all but glittered with her attraction for me. But I pushed back in my chair, drawing my arms over my chest. “And that means how much time in San Francisco a month, then?”

Samantha’s face grew shadowed. “Oh, maybe about ten days a month,” she replied. “Two trips or so. Maybe more or less, depending on the deals we’re currently working on. As the business grows, we might even have to take you out there full-time.”

“That could be difficult,” I replied. “I have a daughter, as I believe I’ve mentioned several times. She takes top priority.”

“As she should,” Samantha agreed.

I thought I caught her rolling her eyes, caught up in self-importance, and her feelings that I should toss away my family, my old life, for such a wonderful opportunity. Sipping the whiskey once more, she passed the paper across the table, handing me a pen with her free manicured fingers. “If we could just have you sign on the dotted line that would be wonderful. Then, we would like to take you out for drinks and a meal. Get to know the man we’re about to center our lives with.”

“Absolutely,” I said, giving her a smile. With a last-minute feeling of doubt passing through my gut—I wondered if Rachel would be all right without me, for at least ten days a month? I scribbled my name across the dotted line and then passed her the contract, telling myself, over and over again, that this was for the good of my career. That it would help Rachel, my ten-year-old daughter, in the long run. That I deserved to be the man I could be, rather than the man I already was.

A seven-figure contract.

Rachel’s college. Expensive trips to the Caribbean, to the west coast, to Europe, even. I could make that happen, from now on. All my worries would cease.

In the chaos that followed, I found myself in the midst of the other partners—three men and a woman, all flown in from San Francisco to meet me. They shook my hand, making penetrating eye contact, and smacked my broad shoulders with tidy, tech hands. They were Roger, Carlos, Hank, Samantha, and Monica, and they were my team, now; my new, west coast family.

“You know of a good bar around here?” Hank asked. He was shorter, wide and robust-looking as if he’d taken a tackle during football season a time or two. “Now that the paperwork is filed, I think we should eliminate work talk for the night. I mean, how many goddamn meetings do we need to have?” He laughed, giving me another sound pat on the back. “Hey, we like you. You like us. As far as I’m concerned, I say we get the game going, roll up our sleeves and pass a few beers around.”

I gave him a wide-stretching smile. It felt false and made my cheeks ache, but it pushed us out the door and toward our cars: their rentals, and the old truck I’d been carting Rachel around in since the dawn of time, it seemed. Well, at least since the divorce, when Marnie had dug her heels in and taken the better of the two vehicles. She always whined that she needed it for the flower deliveries that she was making at the time before ultimately wrecking it and buying a new one with the custody money.

But I couldn’t think about that. Not now.

At the pub, tucked in a bar-strip near North Carolina State University, we sat at a long table, ordering draft beers. Hank barked at one of the servers, saying he wanted the college game on state—a Berkeley football game that nobody in North Carolina gave a rat’s ass about. But as it was only two in the afternoon, and the bar was void of customers, the bartender flipped the channel begrudgingly. “They better fucking tip me,” I heard him mutter to himself. No one else seemed to notice.

Samantha, the bright-eyed HR girl, sat near me, reading over her menu. “Oh, what’s good here?” she asked looking at me, her voice high-pitched. “I was thinking about the chef’s salad. Is that something you’d recommend?”

I glanced at her tanned, slim figure, noting she looked California born and bred—as if she’d eaten a salad every single day of her life. I nodded, hearing myself say, “Sure. I’ve heard it’s okay.”

She smiled at my answer, noticeably attracted to me at this point. I looked away, feeling the ache of danger in her wanted-workplace-romance, and I tried to focus on Hank and Carlos’ conversation about the game. Which guys were injured, their stats, their assurances that they’d win this game by ‘at least two touchdowns, or I’ll take three shots.’

Deep in my pocket, my phone began to buzz. Distracted, I looked at the bright screen and found that Rachel’s school was calling me—a rarity, as generally, they called Marnie with any problems. Marnie no longer worked or held down a job. She pretty much lived child support check to child support check. Lifting my finger to the guys around the table, I turned swiftly toward the corner and answered it.

“Hey. This is Tyler Renner.”

“Mr. Renner. This is Highland Elementary.”

“Yes. Sure. What’s going on?”

“Rachel’s is sick, Mr. Renner. You’re going to need to pick her up a bit early.”

My stomach quaked with sudden anxiety. My voice was low and uneven. “Is she all right?”

“There’s a stomach bug going around. Nothing major but she might miss a few days at school.”

“And you’ve tried my ex-wife?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, we’ve called Mrs. Porter several times without an answer…” the voice returned, sounding somber, if vaguely judgmental. “Terribly sorry, Mr. Renner. Really.”

Imagining my daughter, strapped to one of those germ-ridden elementary toilets, vomiting her brains out, I stuffed my phone back into my pocket and returned to the table, my face blotched with red. Tossing my hand out across the table, I shook each of my new partners’ hands and then shook Samantha’s—noting her deep, knowing look—before saying, “Hey guys, I have to excuse myself. There’s an emergency at my daughter’s school. I’ll see you all next week in San Francisco. I’ll get the first round of beers.”

They were noticeably disgruntled, but I forced myself not to think about it too hard. It was only the first day. It wasn’t like they could revoke the contract, just like that.

The drive to Rachel’s school made me manic, my knuckles growing white as I gripped the steering wheel with such intensity. Cursing as I parked, I sent several messages to Marnie. In my anger, I said several things that were ill-advised, especially from my stance of always trying to be the bigger person for the sake of Rachel.

“Where are you?”

“Why can’t you just pick up the damn phone? Your daughter’s sick and needs you.”

“Dammit, Marnie. Why are you doing this to us? To Rachel?”

My daughter was stretched across the nurse’s station’s bed, her arms wrapped tight around her stomach, and her dirty blonde hair swept back across the pillow. She looked meek, fatigued, her cheeks void of color and her eyes staring directly at the ceiling. When I walked in, I felt my heart sink.

“Hey, Daddy,” she whispered, her voice weak and low—as it had been when she’d been a much younger girl. “I’m sorry you had to leave work.”

“Rach, baby, it’s okay,” I murmured back, drawing my arms around her and lifting her. She gave off the vague stench of vomit, smell you had to grow accustomed to as a parent, but still set her chin on my broad shoulders, giving her full trust. I gave a final nod to the nurse and the secretary, carting Rachel back to my truck.

Driving toward the little colonial I’d purchased after the divorce, I continually turned my eyes toward my daughter, watching as her eyelashes crashed toward her cheeks. When she could speak, she muttered about science—her favorite subject.

“The antibodies are taking over, Daddy,” she whispered, rolling her hands across her stomach. “We learned about this in our last lesson. That you only get sick when your body takes over and tries to fight.”

When we finally arrived home, I laid her on her bed and gave her a fresh pair of pajamas. Her bedroom was an exhibit of science experiments from years past, all of which I’d helped her with from gluing to cutting to drawing to refilling the snack supply. I’d been by her side day-in and day-out. She spent maybe five or six days a month at her mother’s, during which time I threw myself into my work focused on making a better career for us. For Rachel and I.

I just hadn’t imagined that my career would take me so far away. Who would help Rachel, during these types of moments? Would it be Marnie? Would Marnie honestly offer her skills to these science projects, when I would be caught in meetings on the west coast?

I highly fucking doubted it. The woman was useless.

As Rachel slept, I walked toward the front room and poured myself a drink, a whiskey sour, which grew tart against my tongue. Glancing across the yard, I eyed the still-empty house next door, which held a ‘FOR SALE’ sign—a promise of new neighbors—in the spitting grass out front.

My phone buzzed, indicating a text from Marnie.

Enraged, I felt my blood blast against my eardrums. I poised several text messages into the box, each one worse than the last.

You don’t deserve to be her mother.

Rachel needed you, and you didn’t give a shit.

Why don’t you just leave us alone?

Rachel doesn’t even fucking like you.

But I didn’t send any of them. I had to try and keep a good relationship with her, if only for Rachel’s sake. That little girl was my life. When people had tried to explain to me what it meant to be a father before, I didn’t understand. It wasn’t something you could put into words. But now, I didn’t want to poison her with the same-old, boring shit, the father and mother screaming nonsense at one another, despite being divorced for nearly eight years.

In those eight years, I refused to date or get serious. I hadn’t bothered to create any lasting relationships with women since I felt my life offered no more space beyond what I gave to my daughter. And so, when Samantha batted her pretty eyes at me, above her voluptuous breasts that I couldn’t help noticing beneath her white shirt, I saw nothing but the unfortunate truth. That love wasn’t meant for me. I already had all I needed, right at home.

But now, San Francisco was calling, and I couldn’t refuse it.