2025-10-18 18:13:40Charlie cupped his burning cheek where his father’s palm had landed.
The sting was familiar—a cruel echo from two years ago when Charles Grant had first humiliated him in front of the whole family: that night he introduced Claudia and her children as his “first family,” and Charlie and his mother were shoved to the margins.
Back then, when Charlie dared to speak, his father slapped him and hissed that he was never to mention it again. The scar wasn’t just on his skin; it lived in his chest.
Jacy flew forward and caught him as his legs threatened to give. He felt light-headed—hunger and the weight of shame twisting together.
Claudia stepped forward like a queen reclaiming territory. Her voice was cold as ice as she grabbed Jacy’s arm and yanked her back.
“Do not touch that witch’s boy,” she snapped. “If you keep this up, you’re out. I’ll disown you.”
Jacy’s face was red with anger, but she always had a soft place for Charlie and Bethany, his mother—for all the wrongs they endured.
Her brothers, Jim and Jey, padded down the stairs then, indifferent in their designer clothes, ready to back their mother’s decree.
Claudia turned to Charles, Charlie’s father. “Send this trash out of the house just like you did to his mother!”
Charles shook his head. “However it is, Charlie is still my flesh and blood.”
Claudia was angry, but since she couldn’t persuade him, she then insisted, “Fine! Then push him out of the main house to live with the servants. I don’t want him anywhere near my sons!”
Jim and Jey supported their mother. “Yeah, Dad! Kick him to the dogs!” Jim sneered.
Jacy kicked hard against it. “Mom, this is wrong! He’s family!”
Charlie just stood there, helpless like a sheep whose fate was being decided by the slaughterers. Charles, seeing the numbers, agreed with Claudia and her sons to push Charlie out of the main house. “Charlie, go pack your things. You’re never to step foot in the main house again!”
Claudia insisted, “No! He goes out from where he’s standing right now! I don’t want him casting any witchy spells his mother must have given him. I’ll instruct the servants to move his things!”
Jacy looked at her mother and warned, “What you’re doing is going to come back and bite you someday. Nobody knows what fate has in store for everyone. Charlie could be richer than us all tomorrow, and we’ll all need his help!”
Everyone burst into laughter. “Charlie? Richer than us?” Charles scoffed. “He could never be Joseph! After all, he never had a coat of many colors!”
They all laughed harder and promised, “Not just bow to him—we’ll lick the sole of his shoe and lie on the floor to serve as his footstool!”
Charlie said nothing; he knew Jacy was trying to help him stay positive, but none of what she said could ever be a reality. Anyways, his fate had already been sealed by his stepmother; at least he still has a roof over his head.
Now, he needs to go look for his mother and be with her. Just as he turned to leave, his phone rang. It was from a hospital.
“Hello?” Charlie answered, his voice trembling.
“Mr. Charlie Grant? Your mother, Bethany, was involved in a fatal accident. She’s dying. Come immediately!” The voice on the other end was urgent.
Charlie screamed, leaving everyone shocked. Jacy rushed forward. “What’s wrong, Charlie?”
“Mom... she had an accident! She’s dying!” Charlie cried out.
To his not-so-much-of-a-surprise, everyone was excited except for Jacy. Claudia chuckled. “It’s about time for that witch to die anyways!”
Charlie knelt before his father and begged, “Dad, please! Send one of the drivers to take me to the hospital so I can see Mom and save her!”
Charles was touched and was about to incline to his plea when Claudia stepped in again. “If you help that witch, I’ll divorce you right now!”
Jacy cautioned, “Mom, stop this!”
But Claudia ordered, “Jim! Jey! Take your sister to her room!”
Jim and Jey moved like loyal shadows and dragged Jacy upstairs when she protested, slamming her in her room and folding the lock like a jailer.
Charles sat back as if the conversation were over. “You are on your own,” he said plainly.
Charlie looked at his stepmother with so much hate in his eyes, he wished he could just strangle her to death right now.
In anger, he sent out a threat to the entire family. “Should I lose my mother, I’m going to make sure you all regret ever breathing the same air as me!”
Everyone was shocked by the threat and just stood there as they watched him storm off the property. Just as he got outside, he received a call from Jacy.
“Charlie! I called you a taxi and paid with some coupons I had left so you can meet Mom on time. Mom froze my accounts—that’s why I couldn’t send money.”
Charlie thanked her, and just then, the taxi arrived. He got in and went straight to the hospital.
On getting to the hospital, the doctor approached him gravely. “Your mother is dying. She needs to be operated on immediately.”
“Why haven’t you gone ahead with it?” Charlie demanded, his heart pounding.
The doctor sighed. “Her medical clearance and insurance were revoked a few hours ago. We need at least a 50% deposit before we can work on her.”
“How much is that?” Charlie asked, dread filling him.
“$300,000.”
Charlie almost fainted. Where could he possibly get such an amount as a part deposit to save his mother’s life? He had just one option: call his father and apologize for his threat earlier, then beg for the money.
Charlie couldn’t afford to lose his mother, so he tossed his pride and anger aside. He called his father, but it was the devil of his stepmother who picked up.
“What do you want, trash?” Claudia spat.
“Claudia, please... Mom needs $300,000 for surgery. She’s dying!” Charlie pleaded.
Claudia laughed wickedly. “Where do you want us to get such an amount from?”
Charlie was shocked by the woman’s evilness; $300k was nothing to her nor to his father. His brothers and sister get a monthly allowance of $100,000 each, while he gets just 1% of that.
While still on the phone, he heard his stepmother instructing someone, “Add two Lamborghinis for my sons and one Ferrari for my daughter to the order.”
The dealer replied, “Each at $250,000, totaling $750,000.”
Claudia insulted the dealer. “You piece of shit, do you think money is my problem? If my children want something, their father is rich enough to get it!”
The dealer apologized, and she continued, “Add the latest Rolls-Royce Ghost for me—over $1.5 million. It’s our birthday tomorrow!”
Charlie was shocked; the same woman who asked him where he expected them to get $300,000 to save his dying mother had just made a purchase of cars worth over $2 million.
Claudia returned to the call. “Sorry for the distraction. You know, it’s mine and the triplets’ birthday tomorrow, so I’m busy. Send my not-so-kind regards to your dying sorceress of a mother.”
The call ended with Charlie shocked and frozen to his bones. How could someone be this wicked? Just then, the doctor walked up to him.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Grant. Your mother has died. But she left you a note with a message and a strange number to call that would change your fate.”
Charlie couldn’t care one bit about the message she left or the number that would supposedly change his fate. His fate had already changed; he was now motherless and was bound to suffer the woes of this life, all thanks to his evil stepmother and father.
Charlie fainted.
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CHAPTER 270
The last guests left at seven.Charlie watched from the terrace as the final cars moved down the estate's long driveway and the grounds returned to their own quiet.Mrs. Adeyemi's staff moved through the gardens with an efficient discretion as they cleaned. The catering team packed with practiced speed. The ensemble had left an hour prior. The formal gardens, which had held the afternoon's grandeur, were returning incrementally to their ordinary state.The roses remained.Charlie turned back into the house.The inner circle had gathered in the sitting room — the room with the best light, George's room, the room that had been reorganized in February to hold what the last months required. Emily on the settee, Jacy in the armchair she'd occupied at the earlier dinner, legs tucked under her, watching George, Daniel and Cindy side by side on the small sofa, close in the way they always were, Daniel's hand resting over Cindy's without either of them appearing to have decided it. Joseph sta
CHAPTER 269
The toasts began at five.The light had softened by then, the sharp brightness of afternoon easing into the gentler gold of early evening. Glasses appeared in hands across the gardens, quiet clusters forming and dissolving as people shifted closer to the space near the roses where George stood.There were many speakers.Colleagues. Old rivals. Friends who had become something more permanent than friendship through the long mathematics of shared history. People whose relationship to George resisted simple labels — the sort of relationships that form only when someone has spent decades moving through rooms where decisions mattered.Each stood with a glass raised and said something true.Not the polite exaggerations of ceremonial praise, but the specific truths that accumulate around a life lived publicly and forcefully. Stories about negotiations that had changed entire industries. About arguments that had lasted for hours and ended with both men walking away better for them. About the
CHAPTER 268
The guests began arriving at two in the afternoon.By three the estate's grounds held two hundred people, and by four it held nearly all four hundred, moving through the formal gardens and reception areas. These were people who had known George Maxwell across decades, people who had done business with him, competed against him, been mentored by him, been defeated by him, been changed by the sheer force of his presence in their lives.They had come because he mattered.You could see it in how they moved through the space. Not the stiff solemnity of an occasion shadowed by mortality, but the warm gravity of people who were simply glad to be near someone they valued.George received them from near the center of the formal gardens — standing. Charlie stayed close without hovering.He watched George work the gathering the way he had always worked rooms. People came to George rather than the other way around, which was practical given his energy and perfectly aligned with the way he had
CHAPTER 267
The birthday planning consumed George in the best possible way.Charlie had not seen him like this in months — purposeful and was applying the full force of his considerable organizational intelligence toward achieving it. The decline was still present, still visible to anyone paying close attention, but it had been temporarily subordinated to something that George had decided mattered more than managing his own limitations.Mrs. Adeyemi was the primary executor of George's vision, which she approached with the particular combination of devotion and professional competence that had made her indispensable to the estate for twenty-two years. She and George held daily planning sessions in the sitting room that Charlie occasionally sat in on — George with his handwritten lists, Mrs. Adeyemi with her own far more organized documentation, the two of them moving through logistics.The estate's grounds would host the afternoon reception — four hundred guests, catering from the restaurant Geo
CHAPTER 266
Jacy presented the expansion initiative's first quarter data to the Claire Corporation board on a Thursday morning .Charlie sat mid-table. Emily at the head. The twelve board members arranged with the particular alertness of people who had approved something significant and were now receiving their first evidence of whether the approval had been warranted.Two of the three sectors were tracking within projected parameters. Healthcare access infrastructure was performing slightly ahead of expectations in markets where Claire Corporation had existing partnerships — Sustainable agricultural technology was slower, the supply chain complications Jacy had modeled materializing roughly as predicted, requiring patience rather than recalibration.The third sector, affordable housing development, was behind.Jacy had prepared for this.She presented the standard metrics cleanly and without softening, then moved to a supplementary analysis she'd built over the previous two weeks — community imp
CHAPTER 265
The Osei initiative's first complication arrived in June through a three-line email from Hartwell's chief of staff.The initiative's public announcement, originally scheduled for mid-July, was being pushed to September. No detailed explanation beyond scheduling conflicts at the federal level requiring timeline adjustment. Osei would be in touch with specifics.Charlie read it twice at his desk on a Monday morning with his coffee going cold beside him and called Osei before the day's first meeting.Osei answered carefully — too carefully, which was itself the answer before the explanation arrived. The delay wasn't scheduling. Two of the private equity partners had requested modifications to the student selection methodology, specifically the criteria weighting comprehensive support need against academic merit. They wanted the balance adjusted. They had a preferred ratio that would make the initiative's outcomes cleaner on paper and considerably less useful to the students it was suppos
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