Page 47 of Barely

I eye her. “He’s my dad.”

“I realize that, and I know that makes this so much harder, but…” she shakes her head. “You need to hear this.”

“Ms. Simpter, I’m very aware of what my father did—”

“No, you aren’t,” she says quietly. “Not even half of it.”

I swallow. “What?”

“Defrauding his investors? That was just the tip of the iceberg. I think he planned to keep it going for as long as he could, but realized the authorities were on to him for… well, other things.”

A cold shiver teases through me.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you maybe want to go somewhere and—”

“I don’t know you, Ms. Simpter. Right here is fine.”

She smiles. “Of course.”

“So? What else do you think he—”

“You can call me Olivia, Brynn. And I don’t ‘think’ anything.” She bites her lip before she sighs. “It might be best for you to see for yourself.”

She nods at one of the campus benches near us on the walkways, and I nod as I follow her over and sit. Olivia hands the stack of files over to me and when I take them, I shiver. I open the top one, and I’m ready to ask her again who the hell she is and why she’s here at my school to talk about my dad, when suddenly, my heart stops.

Oh God.

The paper is titled “Project Gemstone,” and when my eyes scan lower, my heart starts to sink. It’s a mining corporation that my father apparently owns somewhere in West Africa near the Congo, and as I start to read, my stomach starts to turn. Phrases like “acceptable mortality rate” and “disciplinary motivational techniques” jump off the page. I turn it, and instantly, my hand flies to my mouth, tears in my eyes and a choking cry on my lips.

Pictures. It’s pictures of what can only be descried as hell. Horrible little shanty huts with starving looking children and their parents looking even hungrier—most missing limbs. And there on the dirty work overalls and on the walls of some of the buildings is the same logo from the top of the “Project Gemstone” sheet and the name “Congo-Atlantic Mining Corporation.” My eyes scan lower to a row of numbers—statistics—and when I realize what they are, the tears start to flow.

They’re death tolls.

“What—” I choke, shaking my head, and Olivia puts her hand on my arm. “Acceptable mortality rate!?” I hiss. “This says fifty-percent of the workforce died.”

She nods, her face white. “I’m so sorry, Brynn. But this is just one of these, well, the ‘types’ of operations your father was running.”

“And you worked with him?”

She shakes her head. “Not on this shit, no. I’m an analyst. None of us who are now digging this stuff out new about it. It was all coded and hidden as bylines in other corporate spending.”

I feel cold, numb. And slowly, I look up at her.

“And there’s more?”

She nods quietly. “Brynn, there’s…”

“Tell me,” I whisper.

“There’s a lot more.”

Oh, and there is. File after file, my heart starts to break, until I’m just crying as I read about the monster that my father really is. Chemical plants hidden on wilderness protection land in India where the entire workforce and surrounding population all got lung cancer from lack of any sort of control on chemical fumes. Poaching operations in Africa and China. I glance at one page until I realize it’s about trafficking women—young, young women—for sex in Eastern Europe, and I look away before I throw up.

“My father…” I whisper, shaking my head as I push the files back into her hands. “My father is a monster.”

Olivia swallows, her hand moving back to my arm. “I’m so sorry to be the one to show you all of this, honey,” she says quietly. “But you needed to see it. All of us in the analytics department who discovered this thought you should. We can go to the authorities with it, but the contracts and non-disclosures we all signed could tie this up for years. Your dad could even spin it long enough for his lawyers and his fixers to bury everything.”

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