Page 131 of Beau and the Beast

“Three dead after domestic dispute over unpaid bills escalates”

“NWPD: Wall Street execs targeted in home-grown terrorist plots”

“I gave you writing by people who wanted to see the good parts of me,” Wolfram explained, finally looking up. “But you deserve to see it all. I don’t want a book written only about the good parts.”

Beau picked up one of the articles and scanned it. It was about the crash in general and didn’t mention Wolfram or his father’s company by name.

“You can’t feel responsible for the entire crash,” Beau said cautiously.

“And yet I do,” Wolfram said, sitting back. “Every one of us is implicated in this—me, Violet, all of them. We sat by getting rich off the backs of people who had nothing. We’re still rich off of them.”

“But you paid for it,” Beau protested. “A hundred times over. And now all any of you do is put goodness into the world. You’regoodpeople.”

“And yet we’re still cursed.”

“Maybe the curse didn’t work like that—maybe there’s something different that needed to happen, like Violet said. The book, or—“

“No matter,” Wolfram said. “You’re writing about me and I’d like to give you the full picture. I’d like you to spend some time with this side of my story and we can regroup this afternoon.”

Beau didn’t protest. Wolfram did have a point. If he’d have written a piece like this back at The Ledger, Beau would’ve interviewed far more people than the ones that the subject surrounded himself with—and he certainly would’ve scoured every source he could find to determine what else had been written about the man.

Just because he cared for Wolfram didn’t mean that he should ignore everything he’d learned as a journalist.

Beau regrouped in the bedroom, dressing in the clothes that he’d secreted out of his room and into Wolfram’s quarters. So far no one had noticed that he hadn’t been returning to his room at night. Maybe they never would.

* * *

Beau worked quietlyin the study all morning and Wolfram was happy to have him close by as he tended to his own work. He’d been too distracted during his weeks with Beau, letting some of his duties with MGEF fall by the wayside. James and Violet had been quick to pick up the slack, but Wolfram enjoyed being hands on with the organizations that they helped.

In the week before Beau arrived, he’d sent funding to a grassroots organization in N'djamena working on clean water delivery systems. He decided to spend the morning following up with them, seeing the progress so far and ensuring that the team there had all of the resources they needed to finish the project on time.

He also needed to check with Violet to see what had happened with his idea about keeping siblings together in the foster system. She’d found just one organization in the country that worked on the behalf of families that agreed to foster siblings. The non-profit raised money to help the families purchase houses—and their efforts had helped a dozen families find a permanent home.

Not enough, though, Wolfram thought, and the scale was too small. Song was their man when it came to helping organizations scale up. Wolfram made a note to loop him in and get him up to speed with the project.

* * *

It was strange, Beau thought, to be reminded of how much Wolfram had been hated before his curse. Ten years ago, when the stock market had bottomed out, Beau had been just 17. He’d never had a mortgage, never borrowed money, and though he paid attention to the news, he had enough of his own problems to worry about to get too engaged in what was going on.

He'd vaguely hated the Wall Street bankers that had ruined so much for so many, but Beau had never wasted much of his time on hating other people as a general rule.

But reading the articles that Wolfram had spread out gave him a taste of the type of vitriol that Wolfram and others like him must have faced in those days.

The more he read, the less he felt sorry for them.

Though Beau didn’t believe in punitive justice, Wolfram had received the type of punishment that so many in the nation had cried out for.

Most of the men and women from Wall Street mentioned by name in the articles he read that morning had gone back to their normal lives since the crash. Most of them, Beau knew, probably went right back to making the type of decisions that had gotten them all into the housing crisis in the first place.

And so although Wolfram had given him the articles with the intention of showing Beau that he wasn’t a good person, it only served to affirm Beau’s belief that the opposite was true.

Wolfram had been punished and his reaction wasn’t to lash out or to simply secret himself away from the world. He’d gotten involved in making the world a better place—and perhaps it had been selfish at first, only to break the curse, but Beau knew that it had become more than that.

Forallof them.

Geoffrey and Alfie and Song—they all talked about their projects passionately. They did things that went above and beyond the normal call, showing organizations how to streamline what they were doing, securing them more resources.

If they didn’t care, they would simply research, invest, and distribute the funds to the organizations they deemed fit. But whether they acknowledged it or not, Beau could see that Wolfram and the staff had woven themselves into the communities that they helped. Even while they were suspended up in the air in New Whitby, they had managed to become indispensable global citizens.

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