Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 87601 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87601 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
“But after that, it’s fine,” Gertie teases, earning a slap on the arm from Elaina.
“Of course, it’s not fine. But I’ve been saving for that trip for three years!”
“Me, too,” Maya says. “I can’t wait to go. I want to see the northern lights so bad.”
“I want to eat all the smoked salmon and soak in one of those steamy mineral lakes,” Gertie says, easing into my empty spot on the couch.
“I want to seduce a Viking. Maybe two,” Elaina says with a wink. “And I hear they have a fabulous penis museum in Reykjavik.”
Maya huffs. “You’re kidding.”
“Scout’s honor,” she says. “It’s supposed to be great.”
Leaving the ladies debating what makes a penis museum “great,” I shrug into my raincoat and step out into the storm.
I’m instantly slapped by a gust of wind that takes my breath away. Elaina’s right. The wind is vicious and likely to be worse on the other side of the heath. Hopefully the pilot has experience flying in nasty weather.
Chin to my chest to shield my face from the worst of the rain, I hurry to my rental car. I have a vintage BMW in the city, but it would never survive the gravel roads and mud pits of rural Maine. I rented a Subaru Forester for the summer, an extravagant expense that ate up almost every dime of my pay from the Maine Wetland Preservation Project.
But this job was never about the money.
I have enough money.
My mother left me a lump sum when she died, and there’s still plenty left to see me through until the trust her mother left us opens on my twenty-fifth birthday. After that, I’ll never have to worry about money again. I’ll be a millionaire on my way to being a billionaire, just like my dad and Adrian’s asshole father, a fact I was careful to hide from my former boyfriend, once I realized how he loathed trust fund babies.
I knew Adrian would never believe me if I told him that money doesn’t solve all your problems. I’m incredibly grateful that I’ve never had to worry about how to pay for college or make rent after working a low-paying wildlife conservation job every summer since high school, but money creates its own set of issues.
If the future of a billion-dollar company weren’t at stake, would my father be so determined to see me take over the reins at Watson Global? If he were a mechanic or a real estate agent, would he care this much about his only child following in his footsteps?
“Probably,” I mutter, squinting at the road as the windshield wipers slap furiously back and forth.
My father is an egomaniac. A generous egomaniac who loves me very much, but a maniac, nevertheless.
He insists he needs me on board to keep Watson Global evolving in a way my mother would have been proud of, but that’s only part of it. He doesn’t simply want to leave behind a thriving, compassionate enterprise. He wants to leave behind a piece of himself, a child sprung from his loins who will rule over the Watson legacy in his stead.
It would have been better if I were a boy, obviously—Dad’s the kind of old-fashioned CEO who prefers his boardroom heavy on testosterone—but he’s also a practical man. I’m a hard-working woman with a good head on my shoulders who graduated with honors from Boston University. I’m also old enough to start learning the ropes now, which is far preferable to my father to starting over again with a new family and fresh kids, who might not turn out to be boys, either.
Dad’s always said he was glad I was born an old soul. He can’t handle “ordinary children,” with all their noise and mess and lack of self-control. The fact that I might have been an “ordinary” child if I’d sensed “ordinary” was enough to win my father’s love, never seems to have crossed his mind. It didn’t cross mine until I started reading more about internal family systems in grad school and realized my external family system was probably a little messed up.
Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t connected those dots.
Sometimes, I wish making Dad proud and being his perfect daughter was still the only thing that mattered to me. In many ways, life was easier back then.
Way easier than pulling into a parking lot where the lines on the pavement are blurred suggestions hidden beneath several inches of standing water…
Thankfully, there aren’t many other cars at the airport at six p.m. on a stormy night. It’s just me and a dozen other Subarus parked along the cracked, tree-lined pavement in front of the one-room terminal building.
I shut off the engine and turn in my seat, peering through the back glass toward the runway. With the rain coming down this hard, I can’t see much except smears of light coming from the various runway beacons and a few grayish white blobs I’m assuming are planes. But I can’t tell what kind they are or if any of them are small enough to be a private aircraft. Thanks to the storm clouds, it’s far darker than it would usually be at this time on a clear summer evening.