Page 75 of Filthy Rich Daddies
Tic leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You didn’t break anything. You exposed the cracks. There’s a difference.”
I look up at him. “You’re not mad?”
“No,” he says. “I’ve made worse mistakes.”
“That’s a low bar.”
“True,” he says, and for the first time, he smiles. It helps more than I expect.
Later, I walk back to my room. I take off the jacket. Roll my sleeves up. Stand in front of the mirror and try to see what she sees. I want to be the kind of man she can trust—not just with the big gestures, but with the small, everyday truths. The hard conversations. The things that matter when money isn’t in the room.
I want to be worthy of the future I saw in her eyes when she looked at Colin sleeping in that hospital bed.
But I know now that wanting isn’t enough. Tomorrow, I’ll apologize again. Not with gifts. Not with gestures. Just with honesty. The only thing I have left to offer that means anything at all.
28
COLIN
Well,that was embarrassing.
Collapsing on stage at a press conference is not on my list of career highlights. I’ve given speeches on zero sleep before. Hell, I once coded an entire subroutine for our POS system while delirious with strep throat and still managed to look semi-human on a Zoom call.
But this? The fall heard ’round the internet? This is a new low.
There are at least five TikToks trending with slowed-down footage of me slumping sideways off the podium like a dying Victorian widow. One of them has a sound overlay that loops a dramatic gasp with a violin swell. Another just freezes on my face mid-collapse and puts sparkles over it like I’m an anime character about to get isekai’d into another world.
And don’t get me started on the think pieces.
“Is Copeland CTO Suffering from Tech Burnout?”
“Was Colin Copeland’s Collapse a Calculated PR Move?”
“Exhaustion or Evasion? Why Colin’s Fainting Spell Has the Board Nervous”
As if I need to fake a breakdown. I was living one in real time.
I sign my discharge papers quietly, duck into the stairwell instead of taking the front exit, and text Tic and Dean that I’m “heading home.” Which is technically true.
They don’t ask which home.
Good. Because I’m not going to the mansion. I’m going somewhere better.
It’s about forty minutes outside the city—just past the last strip of gas stations, the kind of place where the pavement forgets it’s supposed to be smooth and the street signs stop bothering with names. A half-dead warehouse district, mostly hollowed out after the shipping routes changed a few years ago. But not all of it’s dead.
The building is nondescript. Dull gray siding, faded numbers on the metal door, the sort of place you’d never look at twice unless you knew what it was hiding. I punch in the code on the panel beside the door and wait for the heavy click.
Inside, the air smells like cold concrete, ozone, and fresh solder. Home.
This is my off-grid baby. My sanctuary. No cleaning crew. No kitchen staff. No boardroom meetings or surprise audits or goddamn press conferences. Just racks and racks of servers, humming like a lullaby, and a fridge full of Red Bull and protein in both bar and shake form.
I keep the lights low—just enough to navigate. Most of the interior is black-painted steel, cool glass, LED glows, and theoccasional espresso ring on a table I haven’t cleaned. There’s a cot in the back, a couch older than my youngest cousin, and a wall of whiteboards covered in chicken-scratch diagrams, access trees, and red-marker arrows that loop like paranoid conspiracy theories.
Unpolished, unapologetic, unfiltered. Just like I feel today.
I don’t even change out of the jeans and hoodie from the hospital. I just grab a crate from the back room, start packing up physical backups—printed logs, QR sheets, drive maps that I kept old-school just in case the digital copies ever disappeared. They told me I was paranoid.
They weren’t wrong. But here we are. I’m mid-fold, half a sheet of redacted vendor invoices in one hand, when I hear it.
