The Forbidden Professor

As I stood at the gates of my future, I realized I had been planning this day for almost an entire year. Not the way you plan something you want….the way you plan something you need. My father had been gone two years. No body. No explanation. Just a Tuesday in December when he didn't come home and then the slow terrible process of understanding that he wasn't going to. I was sixteen. I went to live with my aunt Janice and uncle Barry. I was grateful and suffocatingly in pain in equal measure and I spent the next two years being both without telling anyone. The day I turned eighteen, the lawyer came. The money he told me about was so far beyond anything that made sense for the life we'd lived that I sat in my aunt's living room after he’d left and just stared at the wall for hours. My father was a lawyer. We were comfortable. Not wealthy. Not whatever this was. The number that lawyer had given me sat in my chest like something I’d swallowed wrong. Up until that moment I had been grieving someone I thought I knew completely. My father… who came home for dinner and helped me with homework and drove me to school every morning for nearly sixteen years, could not afford to leave me money like that. After the lawyer left, I started to understand that maybe what I thought I knew was completely wrong. I went back to my childhood home the next day. My aunt thought I was collecting some more mementos. I let her believe it. I went straight to his office. I don't know exactly what I was looking for. Something that didn't add up. Something that matched the number the lawyer had given me….something that explained it. I turned everything inside out. Went through every drawer. Forced all the locked ones opened. Nothing. I looked through every book, every shelf. Looked everywhere. Then I decided to check his bedroom and searched more thoroughly than I ever had before. I went through his closet, his dresser, the boxes on the shelf above his shirts. Again. Nothing. I stood in the middle of that room for a long time feeling like I was losing my mind. I felt like I was betraying my father, invading his privacy…feeling awful for not letting him rest in peace. Something broke in me all over again just being there. I almost left. Then I looked at the photograph. It had always hung above the small table beside his bed…. a framed picture of my parents, taken before I was born, before my mother, Sarah, had died bringing me into the world. They were somewhere outside, squinting slightly into the sun, her hand in his. I had looked at that photograph my entire childhood without really seeing it. It was just part of the room. Part of him. Something made me lift it off the wall. Behind it, cut into the plaster so cleanly you'd never find it unless you were looking and maybe not even then, was a compartment. I pressed on it and it opened. Awaiting me was a small safe inside. I entered my birthday. Wrong. I entered my mother’s birthday. Wrong. My father’s birthday. Wrong again. My palms began to sweat. Then I typed in a combination of my mother’s birthday and my own. I watched as it swung open…. A breath I didn’t know I had been holding, released then. Inside, there was a folder and nothing else. I sat down on the edge of his bed and opened it. I read page after page of dense legal language…entity names, reference numbers, locations. Blackwood Capital Ltd, Veltris Holdings, West Holdings, Crestfall Partners, Wolfe Group, Orevane Group, Solis International, — registered entities across Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and Cyprus, cross-referenced under file number CIT-LX-0882. Matter: ALD-007/CI. See also REF: HU/CORP/114-B. Dunmore & Associates, Meridian Asset Management — Isle of Man, British Virgin Islands — File No. 2018-CVT-331. I photographed every page and put the folder back inside the safe. I drove back to my aunt's house and sat in my bedroom and looked at those pictures for hours. I didn't understand any of it. Except…one thing. Two words in a document. Harwick University. Prestigious. Elite. Wealthy. I applied a few months later. I told my aunt it was because of their incredible pre-law program. Which was true. I'd always thought vaguely about following my father and becoming a lawyer just like he’d been. But the real truth, the one I couldn’t say was that Harwick University was my only lead. It was the only thread I had. I decided to follow it.