New York Billionaires Series

Another ghost of a smile on his lips, even if it looks dusty, a seasonal item he rarely takes down from the attic. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Just so I understand you better… what made it clear you two wouldn’t be a good fit?”

He glances from me to the pictures on the wall. The wedding pictures. I still can’t figure out why they intrigue him so much. “I could tell.”

“Right. Well, if you were to elaborate just a smidge?”

He sighs. “She was too serious.”

I just stare at him.

“What?” he asks, a bit testily.

“Nothing. No, that… makes sense,” I say. Isabelle was too serious? Anthony is the most serious person I’ve ever met.

“I’m available when you have decided on a second candidate,” he says.

I can’t help but smile at the phrasing. Candidate.

Here I’d thought Isabelle was a good attempt. She was from his own social circle, similar backgrounds, similar in age. But perhaps… Ciara. She’s a new client, young, who said she was looking for someone older and with a distinguished career.

While I might not approve, I can’t judge others’ motives. I’m just here to make connections.

“I think I have someone for you,” I tell him.

Anthony

I blink up at the indistinct crown molding on my bedroom ceiling, as if it will clear my sight. As if all I need to do is squint and I’ll see as clearly as I once did. Funny how the impulse hasn’t disappeared.

Is it worse than it was yesterday? Is it better?

Every day, I do the same fucking dance of monitoring my own deterioration, as if I’m a weatherman predicting a storm. But does it matter when it strikes? In a week or five years, the hurricane will hit, and the results will be the same. One day I’ll be trapped in darkness with no way out, and when that’s a reality, squinting won’t do a goddamn thing. The darkness will be the only color I’ll see. Or will I lose that, too? Blindness is the absence of sight, after all, and black is a color.

I close my eyes as the familiar wave of panic sweeps through me. Is this what it’ll be like? A prisoner in my own head, forever reliant on others. Led around or helped by paid assistants. Entirely dependent on their mercy, while they could do whatever they wanted, with me helpless to stop them. I press the heels of my hands over my failing eyes.

Any other body part, I think. Any other.

No one is listening to make the trade, of course. No roadside devil I can bargain away years of my life with to stave off the decline. Just me and my failing vision, the claustrophobia and panic rising with every second spent in blackness. I breathe through it until the pressure inside my chest grows unbearable, until needles scream beneath my skin.Copyright Nôv/el/Dra/ma.Org.

Then I pull my hands away and blink at the faint sunlight streaming in through my bedroom windows.

Not yet, at least. Not yet.

Is it faint sunlight? Or does it just look that way to me? It shouldn’t still bother me that I’ll never know the answer to that, but even two years after the diagnosis, the knowledge burns.

I push out of bed, the heap of blankets a testament to my restless night. The diagnosis had taken sleep away from me, too, that day in the doctor’s office. Together with my girlfriend and my future. I’d like to report a robbery…

But this kind of theft is legal.

The hot water from the shower scalds, but I welcome the sensation. Let it sweep the clamminess from my skin. A cup of black coffee from freshly ground beans settles some of the darkness. Relegates it back to manageable levels.

There’s nothing coffee doesn’t make better.

Remnants of take-away boxes litter the kitchen table as I walk past it to my home office. Turn on all the lights, including the new spotlights I’d had to install just a few months ago.

My office is flooded by light.

Even so, the headache that hovered behind my eyes yesterday evening is still here, my sleep be damned. Reading the print on my computer is bound to bring it out in full force.

Time to dance with my demons.

I give myself ten minutes to scan the headlines of the news before moving on to my emails. Acture Capital employs several assistants, two top-tier accountants, a lawyer on retainer as well as a wealth manager. We regularly acquired companies, using our human and financial capital to turn them from struggling to successful. Just now, one of our four partners was CEO of one of America’s largest consulting firms. Another was negotiating the purchase of a multi-media company.

And I’d been put in charge of a fucking matchmaking company. The sheer humiliation of it makes my skin crawl. No doubt Tristan, Victor and Carter assumed I had other business projects ongoing at the same time. Save Tristan, all of them also assume I’m still involved in the family’s hotel business.

None of them know I spend most of my days holed up in this New York townhouse.

Or that I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family for two months.

I scan through an email from my financial advisor, recommending a few investment opportunities. Save them to read more thoroughly later. Pass over the one from my older brother before looking at it adds guilt to the cocktail of negative emotions pulsing through me.

My gaze snags on an email thread from my business partners. The email chain has devolved, as it so often has since I’d lost the fateful poker game that put me in charge of Opate Match. In one email, Carter asked if he could be taken on as a client at a discount. Tristan replied that I was the one who had to test out the wares. Victor ended the email thread by telling all of us he had better things to do than talk about this. Clutter up your own inboxes, he’d said.

But he’d always been an asshole.

I’m not about to tell them that somehow I’d already been roped into testing out Opate’s service by Summer Davis, because I still can’t quite believe it myself.

Dates? I’m going on dates?

It won’t amount to anything, but I can’t tell her that, not when she’d looked at me like I’m a puzzle she wants nothing more than to solve. She’d bet on the wrong man when she’d dared me to it.

I shouldn’t have gone along with it.

But her naive optimism and belief in love galled something inside of me, itched at the bitterness that sometimes threatened to choke me.

Summer Davis. Blonde, cutesy, with a matching golden retriever sidekick to complete an image fit for an advertisement.

I frown at the text on my computer. Had it been this difficult to read only moments before? No, I’m sure it had been clearer. It’s been months since I had to increase the size of the on-screen text. I enlarge it a few sizes more, and the text becomes clearer. Even if doing so makes me want to punch the screen, shattering the damn thing as well as my hand in the process.

At least my hand would heal.

I’d stopped working in the office soon after my diagnosis, preferring to sit here, where I can control the light source and the computer. Where I can shut it all down on bad days.

My phone rings, but there’s no one I’m in the mood to talk to right now. Right after the diagnosis, I’d interacted with the world regularly, but I’d learned soon enough that things just got worse when I did. I couldn’t conceal my rancor.

Call it black curiosity or restlessness, but I answer my phone. The number is unknown to me.

The voice on the other end is feminine, professional and familiar. “I have another date for you, Mr. Winter,” she announces, without preamble or hello.