Chapter 2: Declan
“Did you get the message from Dad?”
Walking into my brother’s office through our connected side door, I don’t bother to wait for an invitation and take a seat at his desk.
“The one that says he is sending Evelyn’s daughter to work for us?” Lucas narrows his eyes at me and leans back in his seat. “Do you think she put him up to it?”
The “she” in question is our father’s recent girlfriend, a woman neither my brother nor I approve of.
Don’t get me wrong: we want our father to be happy, but he could have picked almost anyone else and made a better choice than Evelyn.
My first run-in with Evelyn left a bad taste in my mouth. I walked into the kitchen and overheard her berating our staff. Her tone was uncalled for, and she carried herself with such an inflated sense of entitlement.
More worrisome to me: the Evelyn I saw in the kitchen is not the Evelyn I see in Howard’s presence, and I don’t like anyone playing my stepdad for a fool.
Howard made some excuse for her. He said maybe she was getting used to everything, that she was nervous being in a new space. But the way she handled herself outside of his view put my brother and I on edge.
While my dad measures his success in terms of relationships and memories, Evelyn’s focus seems to be on money and status. Small comments here and there make my skin crawl, but she makes sure not to mention money when she’s around Howard.
And it’s not just the comments. It’s the way she lingers when we talk business, how she asks questions with just a bit too much interest in the company’s assets, our future plans, and the valuation of certain properties. She plays it off as idle curiosity, but there’s a calculation in her tone that’s hard to ignore. Lucas picked up on it too—he always does.
Since she moved in, Lucas and I have avoided spending too much time at his home. It’s easy to pull off when we are heading a growing property development company, and so far our excuses have pacified our father. We didn’t make time to try to get to know Evelyn’s side of the family since we both had high hopes that she was just passing through.
But now it looks like there might be something more serious to this relationship if he is asking us to offer her daughter a job.
The request itself wasn’t phrased like a demand—Howard never operates that way—but the undertone was clear. He wanted us to give her a shot. A “foot in the door,” as he put it. The kind of phrase he uses when he thinks he’s being reasonable. But all I could hear was: Do this for me.
Was Evelyn behind this? Are she and her daughter planning something behind Howard’s back? He mentioned he didn’t tell her we were his sons so she wouldn’t feel like it was a handout, but maybe she and her mother already knew.
The thought gnaws at me.
When I snap out of my thoughts, I catch Lucas eyeing me, patiently waiting for my answer. I steal another moment, looking out over the skyline as I answer. “Not sure. It sounds like it was his idea. I wonder how far the apple falls from her mother’s tree.”
When I return my attention to Lucas, his hands are steepled to his lips, his brows pinched together.
“What are you thinking?”
Lucas taps at his keyboard a few times, then turns the screen toward me. It shows a list of all the vacant positions in our company.
“Just trying to figure out where we should put her. We have our own assistant position open, but maybe that’s too close. We could always toss her in with the admin pool, and she ends up where she ends up.” He smirks as he internally considers something. “Or we could place her where our highest admin turnover is and hope she quits.”
I roll my eyes. “This hire is a favor to our father and we shouldn’t give preferential treatment one way or the other. That includes setting her up to fail.”
Lucas leans back again and sighs. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”
In the end, we decide to toss her to our Human Resources department, and they can assign her to the admin pool based on her résumé. Then we can learn more while keeping our distance. If she really doesn’t know who we are, then we have an advantage.
I stand, smoothing my hand over the front of my jacket, but I don’t leave just yet. I can’t shake the feeling that something’s coming. Not a storm—but maybe a slow shift, something that could either settle into nothing or unravel everything we’ve built.
Monday can’t come soon enough.
