Page 117 of Wrong Room, Right Billionaire

“Ratings are down,” I say.

“They’ll go back up,” he offers.

“Bookings are down,” I add.

“Again, fluctuation is normal. Focus on the court case and you’ll steer the train back on the tracks. He’s got no solid ground,” Donovan tries to encourage me. But right now, I don’t want encouragement. I want the bullshit to be over. Done. I want to restore everything to what it was 20 years ago. Back to what it was just a few days ago…

I sniff and clear my throat and shove thoughts of her to the back of my mind as deep as I can shove them. Problematically, thoughts of Scarlett seem to float to the surface when I’m not paying attention. Forgetting her is a minute-by-minute struggle for me.

“Here’s the thing,” I sigh. “I don’t want to go to court.”

“You don’t mean you want to just hand it all over to him, do you?” Donovan asks.

“Hell no. I just mean it’s ridiculous that we are going to court to begin with. Can you imagine what my parents would think?” I ask.

“No, I can’t,” he says quietly. “But with Conrad, there’s no easy way.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose and squeeze my eyes shut. I am willing away a headache that I’ve had all day, probably from the fight I got into with said brother. He only got one real shot in, a shot that gave me a swollen lip. Then, while we were rolling around, we managed to bang each other up pretty good. It was a reminder that as fit as we are, we’re not exactly strapping young lads anymore.

“You can only do what you can,” Donovan tells me, and I nod.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah…”

As I’m driving home, something festers in me. I can see my parents in my mind. Hear their voices. I worry about how people talk about memories of loved ones fading, so I have made a point over the years of replaying their faces, their voices, and their laughs enough times in my head that I won’t forget.

They would hate this.

They would tell us to work together. To fix it outside of a courtroom. To reconcile.

I turn left instead of right, and even though the pit in my stomach grows with every mile I take in the opposite direction of my house, I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m doing what they would want.

I haven’t been to my parent’s estate in years. But as I pull up to the gate, despite it being owned by Conrad now, it looks exactly the same. A rush of feelings crash into me, and I let them flood over me momentarily before punching in the gate security code only to have it flash red.

“Alright, so he changed one thing,” I mumble before pressing the call button. Thanks to security cameras, he knows it’s me, and having pressed it again, he answers.

“In your words, brother, what do you want?” Conrad asks.

“Open the gate,” I tell him, more exhausted than anything.

Conrad snorts. “Fat chance.”

“Look, I just want to talk,” I tell him.

“I thought you said it wasn’t a good idea for us to talk. I thought you said you were done,” he says.

“I am done. Done with the bullshit. The fighting. The animosity…”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you fired shots,” he says and I bite back what I really want to say before saying what I should say.

“I’m not here to fight,” I say.

“Good, because I don’t think it’s going to look good if we show up in court with more bruises. My lawyer advised against it,” he says.

“Conrad,” I level with him. “I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to go to court.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re going to lose. Again, you should have thought about that before.”

I pause again. “This is a family matter. Let’s settle it without lawyers…” I say. Then, “It’s what they would want.”