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Nicole
When I stoppedthe car outside Casa di Rossi, I used the last of my tissue stash to dry my eyes.
Lara was in the kitchen when I entered. “You got a FedEx delivery.” She pointed to the purple and orange letter envelope.
“Not interested.”
Echo wandered over for a quick pat before returning to his bed.
Lara looked up from the sandwich she was making. “You’re back early.”
“Short day,” I answered, not sure how I could explain the disaster today had become.
“Who killed your cat?”
“Huh?”
“You look like shit.”
I gave up on the facade. “I feel like shit. That asshole Ernst,” I said, skipping the uncle moniker he no longer deserved, “went and sold the company out from under me over the weekend.”
Her mouth dropped open, and the knife she held slipped off the bread and spread peanut butter onto the counter. “That’s fucked up. How can he do that?”
“Your mom and fucking Ernst control my shares until my birthday.”
“Can’t you sue or something, and stop them?” She grabbed a paper towel to clean off the counter.
“That’s not the way it works. It’s done. It’s too late.”
She wiped up the mess. “You’re wrong. When I bought my truck, I had a few days to change my mind and walk away from the deal. Some stupid law or other lets you do that.”
I grabbed the envelope and tore it open. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way out of this.
Starting through the massive pile, the reading was tough going. It wasn’t until page ten that I found it. The paragraph was labeledright of rescission.
“You’re a genius,” I told Lara. “There’s a right of rescission.”
She held up a finger while she finished the bite of sandwich in her mouth. “I’ll take that compliment in writing.” She came to look over my shoulder. “What’s it say?”
I reread it five times to be sure. Each time I came to the same awful conclusion. “Fuck. They can cancel it, but we can’t.”
“So convince them it’s a bad deal,” she mumbled, chewing on another mouthful.
“It’s not that simple. The bank canceled our credit. Without their money, everybody’s out of a job tomorrow.”
She wandered back to the fridge. “Well, that sucks. How did that happen all of the sudden?”
“The…” I looked for the right words. “Missing money. That kind of thing spooks banks.”
Lara put her hands up. “Don’t look at me. All I did was figure it out, and then get blamed by the fuckhead.”
Ernst had screwed us both.
I was coming around to her view of her stepdad now. Before, he’d been pretty innocuous. He’d let me run things while he got to put CEO on his business card and hang out at his stupid country club, amusing his stupid friends with his stupid Swiss accent.
“I say we get shitfaced and forget about it all until tomorrow.”
I looked up to find Lara grinning, but shot her my no-way-in-hell glare. We weren’t going there—not with her history with alcohol.
