Page 54 of The Billionaire & the Nanny: Part 4

Kase

What doyou do when you get a message telling you your fake father-in-law is on his deathbed and wants to see you? Especially when, the last time you faced him, you were outed for being a liar and a total fraud?

I’m sure he wants to tell me what a huge fucking disappointment I am to him, how both his daughter and I made his last months of life a living hell, and how I should choke and hang in my own web of lies.

You face him, that’s what you do.

If that’s how he wants to spend his last moments, telling me I’m an asshole, that’s his right. I should let him have his moment. My only other choice is to be a coward and hope he doesn’t hire someone to off me after he’s gone.

Leaving the cabin that’s been my hideaway for the last month, I drive toward the city. I hate this car, hate the money that paid for it, and hate everything that has to do with my success. It’s all built on bullshit and lies. None of it matters. The only things that mattered to me in this world are now gone.

Pulling into the private hospital only the city’s richest can afford is like driving into the Trump Tower meets St. Patrick’s Cathedral. St. Anne’s rises like a beacon for the heavily insured and walking into it feels like I’ve entered The Emerald City. I find my way to Suite 45 and find several people I know standing around outside the room talking quietly. Some are execs from his company, some are family members, cousins of Evie’s, many of whom were at the party the other night. They all quiet down when they see me.

I’m a dick, the man who lied to everyone.

I see it in their hateful stares, hear it in their scoffs. Fuck them. They don’t know anything about my life. They don’t know what I had to go through, the dilemma I was faced with when Evie asked me to bail her out. And until they’ve walked miles in my shoes, they can’t say shit. I shift past them, keeping my eyes on one person—Nettie. She stands outside the door, hands clasped, eyes red. Will she really miss the old man? Well, why not. When you spend enough time with someone…

“Is anyone in there?” I ask her.

“The nurse is. His liver’s shutting down. They’re giving him morphine now.”

“Should I wait in line then?” I gesture to the crowd behind him.

“They’ve all said their goodbyes. You’ll want to go in as soon as the nurse is done.”

“Okay.” I stand with my back against the wall, wondering what he’ll have to say to me, what I should say to him.

I don’t think I can tell him I regret what I did.

If Evie were alive to ask me to help her again, I would do it again without a doubt in my mind. If her dishonest relationship with her father is a byproduct of the judgment he was sure to pass on her for having a child out of wedlock, then that’s on him. Too late to do anything about it now.

“Nice move,” one of the execs mutters. I look up at him and see he’s talking to me. “You thought you’d be slick, huh?”

I would say “suck my dick,” but Nettie’s here, and I’m a gentleman. “I’m sorry, do you pay my bills?” I ask.

“No, but you tried to get Roper to. Asshole.”

He’s implying I married Evie and claimed paternity just to get Roper’s inheritance. That isn’t, and never was, my intention, but clearly that’s what everyone thinks of me now. Fuck him. Fuck everybody. Except Nettie. Nettie’s a saint.

I don’t honor him with a reply and at that moment, the nurse walks out of the room anyway. “Hardwin?” She looks around.

Hands shoved in my pockets, I tell her, “That’s me,” and walk into the room as she holds the door open for me. The door closes behind me. The suite is furnished a lot like a penthouse at The Plaza Hotel with all the finest amenities, which is silly if you think about it, since this is hospice. In the middle of the bed is Bert Roper, frail, wrinkled, and dying.

Oxygen feeds his nostrils, and a machine by his bed wheezes while another one beeps and another one ticks. There’s a bag under the bed collecting what’s in his bladder, I assume, and this brings me too close to memories I’d packed and stored away from my mother’s last days battling breast cancer.

The old man, eyes closed, shifts slightly when I touch the bed to alert him to my presence. “Sir, you wanted to see me? It’s Kase.”

His eyelids flutter as if attempting to open, but they remain closed. Here comes the part when I get reamed by the old dinosaur. “Kase.”

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes.” The window offers a nicer view than death, so I accept it. “Mr. Roper, I can’t imagine what you must think of me, but I just wanted to say…I loved your daughter. And when she said she needed my help, I didn’t hesitate. I’m sorry if that goes against your own personal beliefs, but I tried to honor her and honor your grandson. I would do it again.”

“Listen…” His hand flips up and lands on the bed again. “I had…Nettie…” He takes wheezing breaths in between words. “Look through Evie’s things. We found it, Kase.”

“Found what, sir?”

“The truth. Journals she’d written after Raymond left her high and dry.”

Journals? Yeah, I remember Evie always carrying a journal or two in her bag. I assumed they were just for jotting down ideas for the business, not for writing personal thoughts. “What did they say?” I ask.

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