Page 6 of Billionaire Romantic
As the day’s meetings pointed out with devastating clarity, it might only be a matter of weeks before I lose everything I have.
Where the hell am I going to go?
I notice with fresh eyes how impressive the white marble walls are, with the ever-trickling waterfall gleaming in the early evening sun. The giant bouquet of fresh-cut flowers that always sits on the front desk is especially decadent today, likesomething straight out of a hedonistic scene from a Caravaggio painting. All we need is a few bowls of decaying fruit and a couple of hot Italian, tousle-haired toy-boys. The concierge on duty waves to me as I walk to the row of elevators.
I’ve always appreciated the luxury, of course. Maybe there have been times when I’ve taken it for granted, only because it’s all I’ve ever known. But not often.
And if I don’t somehow figure out how to turn my father’s business around—a Herculean task—my livelihood, my home and any safety net I might have is all going to slip through my fingers like sand.
I’ve lived in this building since I was four years old. I remember the day we moved in, clear as a bell. My mother was wearing her new pink Chanel suit and as soon as she saw the Juliet balcony, she burst into tears. She wassohappy—as any New Yorker would be, no matter how new they are to it, when they land an apartment as cool as ours.
My parents met when my father hired my mother as one of his assistants. She was twenty and had just arrived from Ireland to interview for her dream job. He was thirty-four and fell in love with her on the spot, hired her, fired her (he made up for it) so he could marry her. The two of them took their vows less than three months later. I arrived seven months after that.
My father wanted to name me Emerson, a family name, but he begrudgingly had to settle on using it for my middle name. My mother insisted on naming me Lucky. It’s on my birth certificate and everything. Lucky Emerson O’Callahan Ashton. On all the paperwork related to my father’s business though, I’m named as L. Emerson Ashton. Which I didn’t realize until after he died, and it almost made me laugh.
He never got his way when she was alive—he loved her too much to argue with her.
My mother was wild and whimsical, with bright blue eyes and strawberry-blond curls that always looked a little windblown, like she’d just stepped out of the neon-green farm-scape of County Cork. Which she had.
I don’t know how they managed to fall in love with each other, the two of them were such different people.
My father was raised in New York, the youngest son of an old-money (depleting at an alarming rate) family.
Chester Emerson Ashton, my great grandfather, was originally from Pennsylvania and made his money in steel. Alotof money.
Which my grandfather, Chester Emerson Ashton II, managed to burn his way through impressively quickly. He lived the high life and had a fantastic time spending all of Daddy’s money while making very little of his own. He bought a sprawling three-story penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side and a vacation home in Southampton. But his business ventures tended to be less than spectacular. Several of them failed.
First the Hamptons home had to be sold. Soon after, the penthouse.
By then his two sons had attended all the best schools, enjoyed a privileged upbringing and were starting businesses of their own. Chester III, my uncle, took after Chester II and was too used to easy wealth to be hungry enough to keep it and grow it. He divorced twice (two more big blows to the family fortune) and eventually became a dissatisfied mid-level banker who drank and medicated himself into an early grave.
Chester II’s younger son, my father, was more focused. He’d always been a quiet, introverted and slightly eccentric child who clearly saw the writing on the wall.
I don’t know if my father might have, these days, been considered “on the spectrum” or not, but he was one of thosepeople who lives and breathes numbers. Like you see in the movies where numbers are scrolling in front of the vision of the mad professor or the unhinged savant and they can’t help but be obsessed with them. I’m sure he was a genius, if anyone had bothered to test him for it.
Realizing early on that his family’s money was all but gone, my father set out to make his own. He taught himself how to invest from a young age and had an uncanny knack for finding undervalued needles in spreadsheet haystacks. He started his fund when he was eighteen and worked on it obsessively. By the time he was in his late twenties, his fund was a force to be reckoned with, had landed squarely on the Wall Street map and every greed-monger in a suit wanted a piece of it.
But my father had two weaknesses. One, he insisted on doing things his own way. Which was staunchly old school. He refused to follow new trends or even update his technology, preferring to use the same techniques he’d used when he was poring over the financial pages in his adolescent attic bedroom instead of hitting the yacht club with Chester III.
His other weakness was my mother. When she wanted a red sports car, even though she’d only ever driven on the Irish side of the road and never once in New York, he bought her one. When she wanted to spend the summer in the Hamptons, he rented her dream house, right on the water (buying it was too much of a liability; he’d seen what a money pit it had been for his father). When she insisted she was fine to drive us out there and he would meet us on the weekend, he allowed her to follow her whims.
And when the car rolled three times off the side of the Long Island Expressway, killing her instantly, while I, a sheltered four-year-old whoadoredmy mother and had never spent so much as a moment apart from her, walked away without a scratch, everyone said “Lucky” was the right choice.
After my mother died, my father became even more of a reclusive number-crunching workaholic.
I was of course lost without my mother.
But with my brigade of new Irish nannies (I remember begging my father with devastated tears:pleasecan they be Irish), a personal chef and a driver who took me to and from my trendy, progressive private all-girls school (my mother’s choice, which he honored all the way through), I slowly adapted to life without her. My Irish nannies read me bedtime stories while my father worked. I made friends and lived, for the most part, aside from the gaping hole in my life without her (and mostly him), a happy life.
My father did not. Without my mother, he lost his purpose, his whimsical, strawberry-blond sunshine and the center of his universe. In the end, I think even the numbers slowly crushed him. He had no interest in pivoting or making the most of new opportunities. It was like he was frozen in time.
I tried to comfort him as best I could. But I think I reminded him too much of her. I look almost eerily like her, except that my hair is blond instead of strawberry. If I’m being honest, I think it broke his heart a little more every time he looked at me. I know he loved me, but his grief overpowered it. He spent more and more time working and slowly going down with his own ship.
Now, I wish I’d asked him more questions about his business, of course I do. Especially since I was always going to inherit it, even if I never expected it to be so soon. I can see more clearly now that he could have used my help. Heshouldhave used my help.
Like him, I have a head for numbers—although I was never even close to his league—while also having my mother’s ability to think creatively and her insistence on looking for the bright side.
Then again, I doubt my father would have taken any advice I might have been able to give. He was too entrenched in his own grief and his own deep, labyrinthine mind.
