The heir they threw away

CHAPTER THREE

The hotel was a place called The Aldrich, forty dollars a night, and the radiator in room 114 ticked all night like a clock counting something down. Ethan sat on the edge of the bed in his good suit with his phone in his hands and refused to sleep.

He called Simone once at midnight, but she did not pick up. He felt stupid for even attempting it and did not call again.

He sat with the silence and let himself feel the full weight of the night, because he had learned a long time ago that the men who refused to feel things did not stop feeling them, they simply stopped being able to see straight.

So he decided to feel the pain coursing through his veins and thumping in his heart. He felt the three years and the kitchen table and the cracked laptop hinge and the four months and the empty emergency room and Lily's voice saying Jordan had a nice car.

He felt his grandmother's face, which he had last seen nine years ago across a conference table, and the fact that she was in the ground and he had not been there, and that was a thing he would carry for the rest of his life.

When he had processed enough of it to think clearly, he finally started working.

He opened his phone and pulled up everything publicly available on the Harmon Group. He had not looked at it in nine years, on principle, but the principle had served its purpose and the principle was done.

What he found when he looked was significant enough actually. The company had grown. in his absence. Under his grandmother's stewardship, it had expanded from its original industrial base into a logistics, commercial real estate, and several green energy contracts. The ammunition division, the thing that had driven him out at twenty-two, had been quietly wound down three years ago, apparently at his grandmother's directive.

He sat with that for a while, resisting the urge to look up the next thing on his mind. He sighed and frowned when his curiosity almost ate him up. "Oh, what the fuck." He mumbled and pulled up Jordan Marsh.

Jordan Marsh, was forty years old and the founder of Marsh Capital Ventures, known in the city's corporate circles as aggressive and effective and not particularly concerned with the means of their wealth.

They had three acquisitions in five years, two litigation settlements, one regulatory inquiry that had been quietly closed and a profile in a business magazine fourteen months ago that described him as a man who understood that the difference between opportunity and theft was largely a matter of timing.

He had been positioning around the Harmon Group's partnership announcement for months. Ethan could see it now in the public record, the way you can see a pattern once you know what you're looking for.

A Marsh Capital subsidiary had also made inquiries into two of the Harmon Group's mid-tier partners in the spring. A consulting firm connected to Marsh had submitted a proposal to a Harmon logistics subsidiary in the summer.

He had been circling the Harmon Group the same way he had been circling Simone, and Ethan understood now that these two things were not exactly separate.

Jordan Marsh did not want his wife and daughter, he simply wanted a connection to the Harmon Group's inner circle, and Simone Cole, wife of the estranged heir, was the closest available thread.

Jordan had made his wife a transaction and she had not known it. Or she had known it and decided it was worth it. Ethan was not yet sure which was worse but both possibilities made his blood boil with anger.

He set his phone down, laid back on the hotel bed and stared at the ceiling while the radiator ticked.

At six in the morning he showered, put the suit back on, and went out to buy a new phone from a 24-hour shop on the corner while the old one stayed in the hotel room. He was not sure who had that number now and he was not ready to find out.

He called Nora from the new phone. "It's me," he said when she picked up.

"You actually called back." She said and paused for a moment "I half expected you to disappear again."

He ignored that snide remark and asked, "What time does it start tonight?"

SHe chuckled lightly before replying, "At seven. The memorial service is at four, then the reception and the business portion at seven."

He heard her moving, the sound of heels on a hard floor, and there was a murmur of something in the background. "Ethan, I have to ask you something."

"Go ahead, Nora."

"Are you serious about coming back.? Because if you walk in there tonight and claim the heir's position, it changes things for a lot of people...including me." She said, her voice thick with a slight restraint.

"I know that." He calmly replied, knowing she'd bring this up.

"I've been managing the company's board relationships for two years while you were gone. I want that acknowledged." She insisted calmly, to avoid it sounding like a threat to her own brother.

"It will be." He said, nodding as if she could see him.

She paused for a long moment that made him slightly uncomfortable, then cleared her throat, "I'll have you added to the evening's list," she said. "But you should know, there are three other parties who have been positioning for a partnership announcement tonight. One of them is Marsh Capital."

Ethan watched a cab move through the empty early morning street below his window. "Of course there is," he said. "There always is."

"Do you want me to send a car then?"

"No." He turned from the window with a frown. "I'll get there myself."

He had until seven. He had thirteen hours, a three-year-old suit and a new phone with no contacts. Overnight, he'd moved from the caring, understanding husband toa man who has lost everything and found, underneath the loss, something that had been there all along, waiting for him to need it badly enough to pick it up.

He put on his jacket and walked out of The Aldrich into the cold morning air.

The city was already moving and he moved with it.