Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
And he wanted everyone to know it, too.
Lucas no longer cared to do that.
Even if he would be right. Not even if it meant a verbal altercation might leave him feeling in control and as if he’d gotten a stroke on his side of the scoreboard against Ronald. His life wouldn’t be made up of a past defined by whether or not he’d come out on top against someone else. That wasn’t how Lucas wanted to treat anyone.
It didn’t matter that the person, in the moment, happened to be Ronald. Or that Lucas hated his father, at the end of the day. Never mind the fact that he could probably sit down and write an entire list of reasons why engaging Ronald would be justified.
No, that person, who his father was, couldn’t be Lucas.
He wouldn’t let that happen.
Lucas put the ball back in Ronald’s corner, saying, “You tell me, Dad. What do you want it to mean?”
That wasn’t the response Ronald wanted.
He scowled at Lucas. “That sounds like something a fucking shrink would say. You’re still seeing a therapist, then?”
“You’re assuming?” Lucas asked back, amused.
“Don’t act like you didn’t stop inputting your daily schedule into your digital calendar for that woman to keep up on,” Ronald muttered.
“Or you could say it like it is—you’re pissed that you can’t log into the company system and dig through my private schedule to see if there’s something you can meddle in,” Lucas returned.
At least, his father had the decency to shrug at the accusation. No denials or a runaround. Simply an acknowledgement of his interference. Just because he wouldn’t entertain Ronald’s mind games didn’t mean Lucas planned to also let the man off with his more recent bullshit.
Yeah, he figured out how Ronald found Delaney’s name.
The same way Jacob did so.
Once upon a time.
Maybe his hubris came at the right time for Lucas. He shouldn’t have expected Ronald to give him more respect and privacy than he did for anyone else. If his father was willing, and often did, play in the employee files of others, surely he would make no qualms about opening Lucas’ for a fucking password.
“I hear your mother went back to Florida,” Ronald said, his attention drifting back to whatever work he had on the desktop screen. “Good riddance, eh?”
“Honestly, it’s like she wasn’t here at all.”
Ronald barked an unsettling laugh. “God, I wish—the bitch.”
Yes, Penelope could definitely be one of those. She earned the title in her own special way, but he couldn’t say he would ever call his mother as much.
The comment made Lucas flinch.
In an instant, he could hear those abusive slurs shouting down the dark hall that had once connected his childhood bedroom to his parents’ on the second floor of their old home. Idiot. Bitch. I hate you. You’re useless. Worthless. Penelope’s insults and yells in response to the horrible things her husband told her had been just as bad, of course.
Lucas had never understood why people who couldn’t seem to stand to be in the same room with one another had managed to remain married for over twenty-five years.
Ronald didn’t appear to notice the moment it took Lucas to recover from the flashback of surfacing trauma from his youth, thankfully. Still typing away at the keyboard, he didn’t even act like someone else remained in the room at all.
Lucas’ observations about the changes in the office couldn’t be overlooked, or overstated, for that matter.
Sure enough, in his two-week absence from the brewery, Ronald had not wasted any time in making his return clear. In a very physical way. All the things his father had decorated and preferred for his own private office space in his rental downtown—that the man rarely used but became one of many sink holes in their accounting books for the company—had made its way to the brewery’s largest office upstairs.
There wasn’t a speck of Lucas in sight.
Not his collection of mystery novels that he managed to read a few pages at a time on the wall of climbing glass shelves sideways to the desk. Gone were the many knickknacks Lucas used to distract himself throughout the day from his desk while he took phone call after phone call or met with one employee after another. Every framed family photograph, including company events where the Daltons attended together, had been taken down from the walls and replaced with large oil paintings of various woodland scenes.
His father’s favorite.
Returned where Mitchel had never wanted it to be.
“Never Ronald,” Lucas said, loud enough for his father to hear over the click-clack of noisy keyboard keys.
Instantly, the sound stopped.
“What did you just say?”
Lucas, who had moved to the far wall where he could study his grandfather’s shelf, stared at the reflection looking back. Untouched and still the same as he’d left the shelf with Mitchel’s urn, framed photograph, and the gleaming brewery plaque next to both, it was the one thing in the room—the whole brewery, in fact—that Ronald couldn’t change.