Page 31 of The Best Worst Mistake
Chapter 11
Silas
I focus on the feeling of the jet’s wheels lifting off from the ground in order to stop my thoughts from racing, but I can barely keep my eyes on the wall ahead as we hurtle down the runway.
It’s jarring every one of my senses to be this close to her again.
I didn’t treat her well after I lost my father. But it wasn’t just her. I didn’t treatanyonewell during that time of my life, including Grant. In hindsight, I gave her so many reasons to dislike me.
From the outside looking in, it should have been an unthinkably bittersweet moment for me: the passing of my father, laced with the inheritance of his empire. I always knew I’d inherit the family business if I wanted it, and rightfully, I always figured I would. Knowing I was set for life financially made me feel safe enough to screw off at school, treating Harvard like my own backyard playground. I broke all the rules while doing exactly what I needed to do in order to carry a high enough GPA to graduate. I inherited the type of cushy societal background that gifted me one thing: the privilege of never having to take life too seriously. Always knowing I had the family business to fall back on if I screwed up enough, which I did, time and time again.
However, I hadn’t expected my father to die so young. He was the backbone of the money-making machine that funded my entire lifestyle. I thought I had at least another twenty years or so to screw around before inheriting the business that kept him working eighty-plus hours a week just so I could race off to Ibiza on the family jet at the drop of a hat.
It was the stress of that money-making machine that killed him one night at a business dinner at Hyacinth’s on Eighth. A heart attack, right there at the table, while some poor waitress attempted CPR — probably for the first time in her whole life. It didn’t work, obviously, but I gave her enough to retire on ten times over for trying.
I’ve imagined the moment he died on the cold tile floor of that restaurant with a stranger trying to save him a thousand times. Probably more. Him clutching his chest, eyes growing wide, face turning red. The whole thing. The way his tablemates probably didn’t understand what was happening at first, before calling out to see if any doctors or nurses were present. I’ve wondered countless times how long he lay there, writhing on the ground with an invisible tourniquet squeezing his chest before the waitress finally realized that no one else was going to even attempt it. And finally, the moment she knelt on the ground and pinched his nose to deliver that first breath. Probably too late already.
He was gone before the paramedics arrived, proving once and for all that it doesn’t matter how much money you have. You can die right there at the table before the dessert is even delivered.
Grant was with me when I got the call. I’d taken him on yet another boys’ trip away from home, and away from Jules, just days after they got engaged. This one was to Aruba. We were with three other friends, walking down the boardwalk to a strip of seedy bars outside the main touristy area when my phone rang.
“Your father’s passed.” His assistant had delivered the news of his death to me just like that. No pretense, no apologies. Nohello Silasto start. My father was no saint, but I still remember how little care she’d taken in sharing the news with me that day.
“The company is yours now. We’ve sent a car to your GPS location to pick you and your friends up. The jet will be waiting for you all to return to Boston immediately. You’ll need to start approving the funeral arrangements when you return.”
I heard nothing after that. Instead, I handed the phone to Grant. Slack-jawed, my face white as a sheet, or so he told me later.
“He’s dead,” I told him. Plain and simple, just like she told me. “My dad. Dead.”
The rest is hazy. From what little I remember, Grant stood a few feet away from me on the sidewalk, holding my phone to his ear, making the rest of the arrangements with my dad’s assistant while I tried to hold down the acidic bite of bile rising up in my throat. We just stared at each other, neither one of us blinking, while he calmly gave one-word answers to God knows how many questions being asked of him on the other end of the line. He continued to be there for me that day and every day after, more than anyone else had ever been, or would be again.
My asshole attitude from that moment on certainly cemented that.
I was twenty-six years old, standing on a cracked sidewalk just outside a dirty-looking bar with a sign that proclaimedCold tequila and hot girls!when my whole life picked up speed, swirling around me like a tornado. From that moment on, responsibility and adulthood came hurtling toward me from the sawed-off barrel of a shotgun.
A week later, I buried my father.
Afterward, when I peeled out of the cemetery in his blacked-out Pagani Huayra instead of the dowdy town car with a driver that his former assistant had arranged for me, I felt every moral code inside of me snap. Like puppet strings pulled too tight, for too long, ripping apart at the seams.
I shot out of his funeral like a bat out of hell, allowing his legacy empire to run off the expertise of everyone else he’d hired and worked beside for years. I wanted nothing to do with it and buried my head in the sand. I had no idea what I was doing, and the thought of it absolutely terrified me. Paralyzed me. Without Davenport Media, I was nothing, yet, I had no idea how to run it. Any of it. There was supposed to be more time for me to learn, more time for me to show up and give my father the attention to detail that he’d begged me so often to have while ignoring how to handle the ropes of the company.Hiscompany.Ourcompany. I always thought I’d have more time.
He wasn’t supposed to die when he had.
Yet, neither was Grant.
Important people rarely pass when they should — a lesson I’ve learned too many times now. Yet, it’s always unsettling when it comes around again.
My mother’s death was exactly that, especially since I was only eight years old at the time. That one sent me spiraling, rebelling fiercely, especially while at Fox Glenn.
I may have rebelled after losing my mother, but it was my father’s death that destroyed me.
That was when so many of my relationships went up in flames in the aftermath.
I study Jules out of the corner of my eye as our jet climbs in altitude. Her hands are clasped across her lap and her eyes are squeezed shut, though I can tell she’s still awake.
I try to imagine where she must have been when she got the news about Grant. Whether she was sitting right next to him when he inhaled for the last time, or who might have been there to see pain dilate her eyes when she got the phone call, like Grant was there for me when I got the call about my dad.
As much as I like to think that I know this beautiful woman sitting next to me, I don’t anymore. We purposefully shut eachother out of the most important moments of our lives. I have no idea who held her while she cried, or made sure she ate on days when she couldn’t get out of bed. She was surrounded by a sea of well-intended supporters at Grant’s funeral, but I didn’t know who most of them were, only recognizing her best girlfriends from college in the seats closest to her, with her parents flanking her other side.
