Page 49 of Filthy Rich Daddies
Dean tries to counter but stumbles over the numbers due to his lack of sleep. Marcus circles the room, commanding it, and places a reassuring hand on Dean’s shoulder. “We’ll revisit, son.” He calls us sons as if bloodline crosses departmental hierarchy.
At adjournment, I request to join the risk-management subcommittee. Marcus slides his fatherly hand to my elbow. “Tic, you flourish outside these walls now. Let the engine keep humming.”
I smile politely. I’ve seen him make all these same moves for years. Never noticed how fucking suspicious he is until now. Was Marcus always this protective of his turf? Or has he been biding his time for something grander?
Back in Dean’s office, I review his task avalanche. Vendor renegotiations, lawsuit depositions, and a sustainability initiative stalled. Marcus filters them all. Classic choke point. The CFO gatekeeps resources, and the CEO is reliant on the CFO’s loyalty.
Dean rubs his temples. “Three months in and I’m losing ground.”
“I’ll audit Marcus’s ledgers,” I volunteer. “Quietly.”
Dean flinches. “That’s…extreme.”
“Extreme is hemorrhaging margins while the CFO dodges upgrades.” I keep my voice level. “Let me verify the books.”
“Authorization remains,” he says, meaning I still have super-admin credentials.
“Marcus will object,” I warn.
He shrugs. “Only if he finds out.”
After hours, I prowl the finance wing. Janitorial staff buff floors, and I nod as though performing a routine compliance check. No cameras on this corridor since we installed occupancy sensors—Marcus killed the budget for upgrades. Easy enough to make off with one of finance’s laptops, no one the wiser.
In the car, I clone the entire ledger to an encrypted flash. I’m a big believer in backups, and I’m not starting an audit without original data, in case I trigger something. Back in my penthouse, I create a sandbox on air-gapped unit, unleash Python scripts to sniff duplicates.
Four vendor IDs with consecutive numbers funneling payments just under the twenty-five K approval threshold. My chest tightens. The pattern reeks of classic embezzlement.
I don’t want to believe it’s true.
I can still smell the lake mud on Marcus’s old Coleman cooler.?Most Saturday dawns of my childhood began the same way—Marcus idling outside the gate in a dented Ford pickup that looked hilariously mortal beside Dad’s fleet of German sedans.?He would lean on the horn once—no more—and three Copeland boys in mismatched life jackets would scramble down the drive, still chewing toast.
Dad was usually airborne to Rome or Singapore by then; Mom was reading proofs in her study.?Marcus alone supplied the earthbound ritual.?He’d rumple each of our haircuts, pass around thermoses of cocoa sweet enough to stun dentists, and steer north to Lake Lanier with the windows down so Georgia pines whipped the cab with their green scent.?On the water, he never bothered with fancy tackle—just cane poles, red-and-white bobbers, worms he’d bought at the gas station.
When one of us hauled in a bluegill no bigger than a dollar bill, Marcus clapped like it was a record-size tarpon, bragging to the empty cove that “my boys are natural anglers.”?We believed him.?He let us filet the catch ourselves on a plastic cutting board that stank of fish and pride, and he carried every mangled fillet home as if it were caviar for the boardroom.
Off-season Saturdays belonged to the basement workshop he’d carved out of an abandoned loading bay behind the original Midtown restaurant.?The place was sawdust and moth-eaten flannel and the comforting thrum of a band saw older than Marcus himself.
He coached our small hands around chisels, insisting every burr on the wood grain told a story.?We produced lopsided birdhouses and a chess set whose pawns looked like petrified acorns, and Marcus varnished each piece until it shone.?He never corrected our mistakes too early; he let errors ripen into lessons, then showed the gentlest route to repair.?When I became COO years later and started calling defects “process variation,” I realized most of my operational philosophy had been shaped by those afternoons among clamps and shavings, tilted under the warm glare of Marcus’s approval.
He had no children of his own, so he inhaled our milestones like oxygen. At graduation, he clapped harder than our mother. Which is why the ledger anomalies cut like betrayal layered over self-betrayal.
Part of me keeps hunting alternative culprits—rogue accountants, spoofed user credentials—because accepting Marcus as a thief feels like accepting that those dawn voyages and sawdust sermons were set pieces in a long con.
It’s paranoid, I tell myself. Old affection is skewing probability analysis.?But between love and fear, the distance shrinks each hour, and the arithmetic of trust grows harder to solve.
19
DEAN
The operations boardroomechoes with the polite tension of thirteen over-caffeinated VPs clicking pens in unison. Somewhere down the table, Marcus is talking—something about last quarter’s coupon redemption graph—but the sound reaches me as if filtered through aquarium glass.
I’ve always said the coupons made us look cheap. I stand by it. But Marcus is convinced it’s a way to get more people in the door. So, we have a coupon program.
My notebook lies open to a blank page headed “To-Do,” and beneath it, rather than bullet points, an unbidden doodle of freckles across a button nose. Freckles equals Thalassa. Everything equals Thalassa lately.
Be a professional, Dean.
Projected EBITDA shortfall needs triage. Yet my mind refuses to plot profit curves. It keeps replaying her laugh the night we made a blanket fort to make her feel safe. She pressed her palm flat to my chest, noting how fast my heart beat underneath it.She sees wonder so fast, and I lag behind, still calibrating the room while she’s already harvesting starlight.
