Page 31 of Billionaire Corruption

Grace

“Hey girl! How are you?” I looked up in the shop to see one of Toby’s friends, Jonathan, coming towards me.

“Just getting some food,” I said, forcing myself to smile. “How’ve you been?”

“Studying my ass off!” he said, emphasizing every word then breaking into a huge grin. “Man, I can’t believe I’m almost done with high school!”

“What’s next for you?” I asked and listened as he told me about going to community college to study computer science.

“I wish Toby was more like you,” I said wistfully. “But all he can talk about right now is San Diego and what the surf is like.”

“San Diego is radical!” Jonathan said. “He’s gonna have a ball!”

I watched him walk off, wishing him luck.

I had taken a few days off work, saying I had some kind of tummy bug. I needed some time to myself, to figure everything out. I was determined not to let Paul get to me any more than he already had. He’d left a number of messages on my phone, but I had ignored all of them.

I knew that what I had said to him on the street was true.

It didn’t make it any easier, but this situation was rigged against me any which way you looked at it.

I had to face the facts.

The Paul I had met in the elevator was largely a figment of my imagination. The strong hero who had been there for me when disaster struck, was not real. What had he done apart from holding my hand? He’d hardly shielded my fall with his body. I had been upset, adrenaline rushing through my blood, and he’d been the first thing I’d seen when I opened my eyes. If he had been an old man clutching a bag of apples, would I have responded the same way? Of course not.He’d been handsome and since my rational brain was overcome by my instinctual, more fear-driven emotions, I had acted on my attraction to him.

But getting to know him, finding out who he was, had started to cloud that image of him. After speaking to Irina, I’d googled some of the names she’d mentioned. Spillman, for instance, turned out to be a famous venture capitalist, Al Spillman, who constantly made headlines for dodgy deals. I looked into Gill Sanders and his company Red Monkey and without spending too much time on it, I could already spot a number of troublesome facts. Why had it cost so much to refurbish an office in Bonn, for instance, which had been renovated only a few months before? I felt sure that if I pursued these entries, I’d find all kinds of dubious financial accounts.

The conversation with Irina had also led me to other uncomfortable thoughts. Like, what was a good man, really? To her, it was a man who didn’t beat his girlfriend. But I had other standards. To me, a good man wasn’t driven by profit and success, but by helping others and doing the right thing.

This, undeniably, was not Paul.

It was a depressing realization.

Even if I could have talked myself into being okay with him being not-as-good as I’d have liked, there was no way I could pretend that our relationship would work out long term. There was no way I could keep my job and that was the biggest reality check.

Because as much as I liked Paul and being with him, my job was important. It had taken me months to secure the position at the firm, to work my way up into my current team. I knew how hard it was to get a good accounting job in New York, many of my friends had given up trying, looking for jobs in other sectors.

One of my closest friends in college, Skye Jarvis, had ended up taking a job working as a receptionist at a marketing agency, hoping to work her way into the bookkeeping section. We’d kept in contact and every time I spoke to her, I thanked my lucky stars for my job.

It brought money in to buy food and clothes for me and Toby. My father had been paying the rent with his offshore money but for the first time, we were able to afford small luxuries, like cable TV for my grandmother and a laptop for Toby. I couldn’t imagine going back to my job at the salon, where I was washing hair and sweeping floor for a minimum wage. I had spent months being on my feet all day, only to spend my nights sending out CVs and hoping for job interviews.

Someone like Paul had no idea what that was like, and he never would. With his family and connections, there would always be someone to cushion his fall, to help him if he stumbled.

I thought of my father, working as a crane operator at platform thousands of miles away. He’d started out as a basic worker but did the necessary course work to enable him to work high up handling heavy equipment and doing repairs. He told me he liked being up there, in the air. After all the years of struggling to get a job, then serving time inside, it seemed he’d finally found his place.

My phone rang, it was my mother.

“Hey Grace, how you been?”

“Fine, you?”

My relationship with my mother was still strained after all these years. We were talking now, which was an improvement, I guess. But I had never forgiven her for the breakup of my parents’ marriage, or the fact that she had left Toby to me to raise.

“I was wondering whether you wanted to come up for a visit this weekend? I haven’t seen you for a while?” My mother’s voice was beginning to sound a bit whiny. I hated that.

“I don’t know, mom, I haven’t been well.” I told her the story of the tummy bug and I knew she wouldn’t want her twins exposed to that.

“Well, as soon as you’re better then?”

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