Page 23 of Price of Victory
“You alone?” I asked, noting the empty bed on the other side of the room.
“Lennox is mostly at Oliver’s place these days,” Rhett explained, opening a cabinet above his desk and pulling out several bags of snacks. He tossed them onto his bed with the kind of casual efficiency that suggested this was a regular routine.
I picked up one of the bags and examined it skeptically. “Seriously? This is what you eat?”
They were some kind of cheese puffs, the artificial orange kind that left powder on your fingers and probably containedmore chemicals than actual food. The other bags weren’t much better: crackers, granola bars, and what looked like trail mix that was mostly chocolate chips and nuts.
“Unlike you, I had my healthy rations today,” Rhett shot back, settling onto his bed and opening one of the bags. “These are emergency snacks.”
“Emergency snacks,” I repeated, taking the bag he offered me and settling into the desk chair across from him. “Right. Because God forbid you should actually starve between meals.”
“Fine,” he said, popping a cheese puff into his mouth. “I’m happy to eat them all myself if you’re going to be picky about it.”
I opened the bag and tried one of whatever he’d given me. It was exactly as processed and artificial as I’d expected, but I was hungry enough that it tasted better than it had any right to. “Not bad for emergency food.”
We sat there eating junk food in comfortable silence for a few minutes, and I took the opportunity to study his living space more closely. There were details I hadn’t noticed at first glance: a photograph of his family at some kind of formal event, all of them dressed in expensive clothing and smiling for the camera. A small pile of books on his nightstand that weren’t textbooks, actual novels that he was reading for pleasure. A hockey stick propped in the corner that was clearly well-used, the blade worn smooth from countless hours of practice, probably his first, or the first he truly loved.
“This is strange,” I said finally.
“What is?”
“This.” I gestured around the room. “Your family’s worth half a billion dollars, and you live like a scholarship kid.”
“It’s strange you keep an eye on our net worth.” Rhett’s expression tightened slightly, and he set down the bag of snacks. “Why would I need more? I live with my friends, I study thesame as they do, and I don’t have to worry about my next meal. Is that so bad?”
“Never said it was bad,” I replied, leaning back in the chair. “But there aren’t many people out there as lucky as you, and you’re letting it go to waste.”
“You’re using enough privileges for a whole lot of us,” he shot back, but there was curiosity in his voice rather than accusation.
I laughed, because he wasn’t wrong. “Touché. But don’t you ever want more? Don’t you ever think about what you could do with those kinds of resources?”
“Like what? Buy a penthouse apartment I’d never use? A car that costs more than most people make in a year?” He shook his head. “I don’t see the point.”
“The point is freedom. The point is having options.” I tried to find a way to explain it that wouldn’t sound completely shallow. “When you have money, you don’t have to worry about whether you can afford to take risks. You can pursue opportunities that other people can’t.”
“But I don’t want those opportunities. I want to play hockey and get my degree and figure out what comes next. I don’t need a trust fund to do that.”
There was something admirable about his conviction, even if I didn’t entirely understand it. I’d grown up with money as a tool, something to be leveraged and used strategically. The idea of deliberately living without it seemed almost incomprehensible to me.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” Rhett continued, studying my face. “Money changes things. It changes how people look at you, how they treat you, what they expect from you. When I’m here, living like this, I’m just another student. Nobody cares who my father is or how much my family is worth.”
“But they’d care if they knew.”
“Exactly. So why would I want them to know?”
I considered this, turning it over in my mind. There was a logic to it that I’d never really thought about before. I’d always seen wealth as an advantage, something that opened doors and created opportunities. The idea that someone might view it as a burden, something to be hidden rather than flaunted, was foreign to me.
“Don’t you ever feel like you’re lying to them? Your friends, your teammates?”
“I’m not lying. I’m just not telling them everything.” He pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them in a gesture that made him look younger than his twenty-two years. “There’s a difference.”
We talked for a while about wealth and privilege, about the different ways we’d grown up and the different perspectives that had shaped us. He told me about his parents and grandparents, how they’d built their business from nothing and still remembered what it was like to struggle. I found myself sharing more than I’d intended about the pressure that came with being Richard Whitmore’s son, the expectations and the weight of family legacy.
“Your apartment,” Rhett said at one point. “The one you’re living in now. Is it actually yours?”
“Technically, it belongs to a subsidiary of my father’s company. But for all practical purposes, yes.”
“And you don’t feel weird about living in a place you didn’t pay for?”
