Page 90 of Not A Chance

Every cell in my body begged me to ignore his call like I had done the last three times my phone rang with his number on my screen. Going to holiday parties with my mother might have kept him busy this past week, but I knew I couldn’t avoid him any longer.

“Don’t answer it.” Theo squeezed me further into his side, as if he could insulate me from whatever had made my muscles tense.

“I have to,” I whispered. I’d already taken too big of a risk putting my father off for this long.

I lifted my phone to my ear. The last thing I would ever do was let Theo hear the way my father spoke to me.

“Hello.”

“Indigo. I’m not sure what you’re playing at thinking that you can ignore my calls, but you’re sorely mistaken.” His disdain echoed down the line.

“My apologies, Father. Things have been hectic at work.” I bit mylip to avoid saying all the awful words that came to mind.

“Not accepted. I run a billion-dollar corporation with a multitude of subsidiaries. My schedule is quite a bit more than ‘hectic,’ Indigo. But I still answer the goddamn phone when I’m expected to.”

And that confirmed I had fucked up royally by putting him off for so long. My father thought profanity was vulgar and beneath him, so his use of “goddamn” signaled nothing good.

“I’m sorry.” My voice was quiet, my earlier unapologetic feelings now neatly cowed.

“You’re coming home. Tomorrow. Winston will meet you at the airport and bring you to my office. It’s urgent.” He carried on as if he hadn’t heard me.

“What? Why?” The air froze in my lungs, making it hard to force out the words.

“Well, if you had answered any of my previous attempts to contact you, you would know. As it stands, I don’t have the time to give you any information right now. In fact, I’m standing in the hallway of a ballroom, making this call between courses at the benefit your mother and I are sponsoring.” His tone had lost the heat of his rarely revealed anger at being ignored. He was back to his normal stone-cold tone of disappointment.

I kept silent. My mind churned with possibilities for what I would be walking into tomorrow. But I knew better not to ask.

“I swear, Indigo. If you just thought of someone other than yourself for a single moment in your life, life would be much easier.” With that parting thought, he hung up without a goodbye.

He was really angry with me. I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t the first time I’d stretched the limit of his patience when he snapped his fingers for my obedience.

But this time seemed different in ways I couldn’t define.

“Baby?” I rubbed Indie’s back gently. At some point in the short call with her father, she’d separated her body from its cozy position curled up next to me.

Now, she sat with her back straight like the manners police were due for an inspection at any moment.

Indie brought the phone down from her ear robotically. It vibrated with another notification from where she’d set it on the couch beside her.

“What’s going on?” I moved from the couch to her coffee table so I could see her face. She hadn’t looked at me once during or now after the call.

Indie’s fair skin was now pale; all traces of the warm peach undertones that normally lit up her cheeks were gone.

“I have to pack.” Her gaze darted around the room, settling on Giz for a moment when the incessant buzzing of her phone caused our little pup to shift away from the machine disturbing her sleep.

“What?” Giz’s head popped up, ripped from her nap by my near yell.

And still, my girl didn’t look at me. I took matters into my own hands, literally. I brought both my hands to her face and firmly guided her cheeks toward me to force her to fucking make eye contact.

“Tell me what’s going on.” I stared intently into her eyes, searching for any kind of inflection to let me in on what she was feeling.

“That was my father.” Just like that, her muscles gave way like a puppet whose strings had been cut, making my hands feel like they were the only thing holding her up. “I have to fly back to San Jose in…” She picked up her phone and scrolled through the notifications. “Six hours. So yeah, I have to pack.”

“I don’t understand.” I didn’t understand anything about the moment: her total lack of emotions, the demand her father made without telling her the reasons for it, the immediate need to jump on a flight home. Not. One. Thing.

“Can you watch Giz while I’m gone?” She stood, forcing me to let go of her. She appeared like she was operating on autopilot and started listing off tasks. “I’m not sure how long it’s going to be. I’ll need to contact Jermaine when I get in. Hopefully, I still have a job to come back to, leaving like this.”

My gut clenched. As if anything about what was about to go down was her fault. Didn’t her father care that she had a life here? A job she was good at? Surely, as an all-powerful CEO, he knew you didn’t behave this way as an employee.

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