Roland chose to ignore Colin’s father. “You may have until we leave this office. If we fail to reach an agreement now, today, we meet with a senior justice at Raleigh family court in …”
“Two hours and ten minutes,” Celeste offered.
“And then from there we travel straight to a conference with the lady we’ve hired to handle the boy’s PR.” Roland took aim at the man in the corner. “Della Lawrence. Surely you know her. Since she handled the governor’s most recent campaign.”
“Blow your little ship right out of the water,” Celeste said. “Sink your chances of ever getting elected—”
The man in the corner said, “Wait out front while we talk.”
Roger shared his attorney’s crimson rage. “I want—”
The man in the corner said, “This meeting is over.”
But as they rose and started for the door, Roger shouted, “We’re not done here!”
“Yes, Roger, we are.”
“My son is coming home!” His roar shook the windows and turned every head in the outer office.
“Let it go or I walk.” The man’s voice remained as flat and unemotional as pounded tin. “Those are your only two choices.”
Nine shocked faces followed their progress across the front room, while the shouting continued on behind them. Colin felt the words strike like futile arrows. He could not even be bothered to hear what his father yelled. The man was now simply a part of his past.
When he passed through the glass doors, the sunlight struck him like a blade.
CHAPTER22
When it came to informing Arnold and Sandrine and the academy, Celeste again insisted on taking the lead. Colin did not object. Despite the successful outcome with his father, the confrontation had brought back all the early vulnerabilities. Like the shadows had merely lay dormant, lurking down where he could not find them, waiting for another opportunity to rise to the surface.
It was not until they were seated in Arnold’s outer office, listening to voices emanate through the thin side wall, that Colin understood. The academy had become his haven. The place where he had first found a true sense of safety. His new identity, the gifted student, the investor, all this was tied to his being protected there. Seeing his father, learning he and his team had intended to invade and attack, had threatened the first real home he had ever known. Left him looking for a small space to slip into. From where he might observe the world in safety.
Celeste sat catty-cornered from him, able to observe. “You’re frightened. Why?”
“I’m afraid Arnold and Sandrine will be mad with me, you know, over how I haven’t told them what’s been happening.”
She shifted her bulk, moving about the seat, making the legs creak under her weight, like the thought made her uncomfortable inside her own skin. “They might be. Which is why I’m here. To tell them you did the right thing.”
A glimmer of light pushed through the shadows. “You really think that?”
“The only thing.” She kept shifting. Back and forth, like a cat scratching itself against the wall. “I got all hot and bothered when you told me. My first reaction was, you shouldn’t be the one handling this.”
“It had to be me. And now you know why.”
“I accept that, but I don’t have to like it. Plus, everything you said, all your predictions, they need to hear from me just how right you were.”
The voices chose that moment to go quiet. Arnold opened his door, smiled to them both, and said, “Why don’t you come in.”
It took almost forty-five minutes to lay it all out. First the investments and his group of backers, and then why they had been so important. And still were, for that matter, but from a very different perspective than before. The threat was gone. His loathing for being poor remained. Colin knew he probably should have started with the need to deflect his father’s intentions. But it made more sense somehow, at a level below strategy and conscious thought, to show how he had readied himself. And then explain why.
He started with his father’s second marriage. Of course, the warning signals had appeared earlier, back when his father had run for state office. But this was when it all came to a head. The new life. The structured existence defined byRoger Eames’s rising political ambitions. Wanting to create the perfect poster family. Of course he wanted the son from his first marriage back home. It had nothing to do with Colin’s gifts, who his son was and what life he might want for himself, and everything to do with creating the proper image.
Colin stopped at the point when the three of them had arrived in his father’s campaign office. He merely paused, like the transition from preparation to confrontation required him to start a new chapter. But Celeste saw that as her cue, and took over.
She described the meeting in such vivid detail, Colin’s heart resumed its breakneck pace.
Her conclusion was presented with the same clear, unambiguous strength. “When Colin first told me what he’d been doing, and what he had planned, I was angry and I started to chew him out. But by the time we met with Roland, I began to see how he was setting these plans in motion, bringing everything together like …”
Arnold offered quietly, “Like a chess game.”