Overnight Sensation(99)

“Check, please,” Silas says, rolling his suitcase away from us.

Jason kisses me on the nose. “Tell you what. Let’s take a car into Manhattan and get your stuff.”

“Really? You have time for that?”

“For you? Absolutely.” His lips brush mine, and I can’t help kissing him again.

Someone makes a gagging noise, and we don’t even stop.





Somehow we keep it PG in the taxi. When we reach East 78th Street, the cab can’t even get close to the building, because there are news vans in front of Dad’s high rise.

“Just another day in Manhattan,” Jason says. “I wonder which movie star just made the papers? Let’s get out here.”

He pulls our luggage from the trunk, and off we go down the crowded sidewalk.

“Staying overnight?” the doorman asks as we roll two suitcases into my father’s building.

“No, can I park these with you?” I ask him.

“Of course, Miss Pepper! Anything for your family. Give my regards to your parents.” He wrings his hands, which is a little strange.

“Parents?” Jason asks in the elevator. “Like, plural?”

“Well…” It’s just dawning on me that Mom might be visiting. Didn’t Jana mention that? “It’s possible that you’re about to meet my mother. She never comes to New York, though, so I could be wrong.”

When I let myself into the condo a minute later, though, they’re both right there in the living room. “Hi guys,” I say cheerfully. “What’s this all about?”

“Oh! Heidi,” my mother chirps. “I’m leaving your father.”

“What?” I gasp.

“She won’t,” he says in a voice full of misery. “She’s just in shock.”

“About what?” I’m frozen in the entryway, afraid to walk inside. As if staying out of the room can help me avoid whatever is wrong.

Jason gives me a gentle nudge. He closes the door behind me and then squeezes my hand. I’ve got you, it says.

Unwilling to let go, I tow him into the living room with me.

“Evening,” he says. “Mrs. Pepper, I’m Jason.”

“Nice to meet you, too.” She gives him a feral head-to-toe examination, then turns to me. “Well done, Heidi. Is he good at managing his assets? Or will he bet your entire net worth on his ex-roommate’s pharmaceutical company and lose everything?”

I replay this outrageous sentence in my head and try to decipher it. “What’s happened?”

“Sit down,” my father says, indicating the sofa. When Jason and I sit down beside one another, my father gives Jason a polite nod of greeting. “Heidi, I have difficult news.”

“A cancelled dinner reservation is difficult news!” my mother shrieks. “This is Armageddon!”

My father closes his eyes in a show of distress and then opens them again. “I’m sorry to tell you that when I sign over your trust fund next week, it won’t be much good to you.”

All my blood stops circulating. “What? Why?”

“Because I invested it in Kafi’s company. And the FDA just shut them down for fraudulent practices.”

“Oh, shit,” Jason breathes beside me. “The Kafnar Corporation? I read about that. They were falsifying their lab data.”

My mother begins to cry silently.

“Omigod,” I say like a braindead girl. The foundations of my secure little world are crumbling. I thought the money would be waiting for me. And it isn’t. “You knew!” I gasp. Everything makes so much more sense now. “It’s not that you didn’t want to give the money to me! It was gone!”

My father hangs his head. “Until last week I still hoped that it would turn out okay. I trusted Kafi and his team.”

My anger recedes just a little. Kafi and my father played hockey together in college and then in Philadelphia, although Kafi retired when he was only twenty-seven to work at his father’s drug company. Of course my father trusted Kafi. You’re supposed to trust your best friend of thirty-five years.

“And I was upset that you’d left school. You’re going to have to work for a living like most people.”

I weigh this idea, too. And while I’ve hoped my trust fund could help get me the start I want, I realize that working isn’t a scary thing. I like working. That’s why I’d left school in the first place. Bryn Mawr felt so impractical. “If only you’d let me go to NYU for business,” I say in a whisper.

“That would have been…” He closes his eyes again. “A fine idea.” He sighs. “I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t listen way back then. But you were only eighteen, and I wanted you safe in the hills of Pennsylvania.”

Jason and I exchange a glance. He smiles. “Everyone wants you safe. But none of us knows how to get it right.”

I take a deep breath and straighten my spine. Then I smile back at Jason. It’s an exercise in will. “Okay. This isn’t the end of the world,” I say slowly. “I enjoyed being a spoiled little rich girl. But it isn’t everything.”

Jason’s expression turns serious. “You impress me every day,” he says. “I hope you know that.”