Page 88 of The Passion

“We need to talk,” I start, following him into the office and closing the door behind me.

“Not interested, any talking will be in Saturday’s meeting.” His reply has no feeling in it.

“I don’t care, you will listen anyway, because I’m not leaving here until I say everything that I came here to say.” I stand in front of his desk while he takes a seat and presumes the body language of arrogance, to remind me that he is my father, the boss, and the lord of the house, literally.

“I think you said enough on our last phone call, Felisha. It is quite clear now that you will no longer do as I wish, and that has all come about after you have met this man that you profess to love.” I hate when there is no change in the tone of his voice because I can’t read him. Over the years I have learned to readpeople well. It’s a skill you need in business meetings when you are in the process of negotiating deals. But it now makes a lot of sense that reading my father’s face and body language has always been hard for me, but it must be a trained skill of his to have the perfect poker face. Gets him through his gambling so at least some of the time he wins.

Well, he isn’t winning this time. I’ve had enough of being pushed around by him in the last few months.

“Did you ever love my mother?” The question catches him off guard.

“What?”

“Did. You. Ever. Love. My mother?” I spell out the question like he is a child.

“Why does that matter?” His eyes now show that I have poked the bear, and all I can think is, good. Now, where is the bigger stick so I can poke harder.

“Well, I think in your silence, there’s my answer. For two reasons. The first, you wouldn’t have hesitated to answer my question if you did. The second is you wouldn’t ever question my love for Flynn if you knew what it was like to be with someone you know you can’t walk away from them. Regardless of who they are and what they do for a living.”

Pushing up from his desk, he stands and looks me directly in the eye. “He is just screwing you to get his hands on my money and my hotels.” He is now yelling at me. “But he made one fatal mistake. He can’t take what you don’t have and will never own. I have made sure of that.”

I take a deep breath and count to ten as I let it out because I don’t want to stoop to his level.

“You are wrong. And I feel sorry for you, that all you have ever seen in life is evil in people, that most of the time doesn’t even exist.” I think of my poor mother who at one time thought this man loved her and would treat her like a princess. Instead,he used her to get a child, which according to him she didn’t do right anyway. A failure, he called her, and then she became the witch in his eyes who was just after his money. I can’t imagine how much that hurt when the reality of the kind of man he was finally showed its face. He then slept with countless women and was never too discreet about it, making her feel worse than she already did.

“There is evil in everyone, including you. Turning against your own father. I raised you better than that.”

“Fuck. Off!” All my restraint is now gone, and this is becoming a screaming match. “You didn’t raise me, my mother did.”

“That money-grabbing whore knows nothing about business, and you would be spending your days in a hair salon if it were left to her to guide your life. I gave you everything—money, status, and a place in this business that was obviously a huge mistake. All you have done is disgrace the family name, and you continue to do it on a daily basis. A waste of the air you breathe. If I had a son, things would have been different.” He slams his clenched fist down on to the table, and my walls crumble around me.

For all the years I thought it, my father never came out and said it.

Nothing I ever do will be good enough for him to love me or be proud of me because I don’t have a Y chromosome.

The little girl who used to wait for her father to come home every night in the hope that he would play with her or read bedtime stories like my friends’ fathers did, I’m crying for her. But for the almost forty-year-old woman whose father secretly videoed her having sex and then shared it with the world to use against her, I’m standing tall. I’m going to bury this man.

“I don’t think the world could have tolerated another Kentwall male if he was anything like you. You disgust me.”Taking a deep breath to keep myself composed, I get the words straight in my head before I say it. It’s time to start the demise of Ewan Kentwall.

“There will be an email in your inbox tonight calling an extraordinary board meeting for next week where I will be presenting the evidence that my own father, the CEO of Kentwall Estates, videoed me having sex without my consent.”

His eyes open wide, and the whites of his eyeballs are a stark contrast to the blackness of his pupils. The moment of sheer panic is nothing I have ever seen from him, and although it only lasted a few seconds before he brought back his steel face, it is enough validation for me.

“Then leaked it to the media as a smear campaign after a false blackmail scheme. All to hang on to the control of our family company so he could keep hiding all his deep, dark secrets.” My heart is racing, hands sweating, and I feel like I want to vomit, but it is also mixed with a freeing feeling of finally getting it all out. “I will be raising a vote of no confidence against you and then instigating a full forensic audit on the company to find your sins. And you can choose to make this easy or hard. Step down now before the meeting and walk away to retirement. Or stand and fight and see where the cards fall. But I assure you this…” I lean forward, my hands gripping the front of his desk so tightly that it hurts, but it’s the fire inside me that has the furor pumping through my body. My face is now no more than a foot from his.

“You fight me on this, and I will turn this evidence over to the police and anything else I find as I keep digging. And I will happily also leak to the media what you have done, because you can’t hurt me any more than you already have.” Standing quickly, I turn away from him. My legs have me moving quickly before I explode with either rage or tears.

“How dare you say such preposterous things about me. You don’t call meetings, I do!” His roar behind me just bounces off me now, as my walls are up and so thick that I won’t let him in ever again.

“You have seven days. I expect your resignation on my desk by then… the choice is yours.”

Not looking back, my father continues to yell all sorts of disgusting things at me, but as the doors of the elevator opens and I enter, I turn slowly to see him storming toward me, and I don’t say a word. The doors closing in his face feel like it’s symbolic of me finally shutting him out of my life.

Now I just have to hope he crumbles to my demands, or I’m in for the biggest war of my life, and I doubt it will be pretty.

I quickly type out a text to both Harper and Flynn saying it’s done.

As I climb into the back of my car, the tears start to fall, and Imala doesn’t make a comment but just puts the car into drive and heads out into the Friday-night traffic in the direction of Flynn’s apartment.

---