The Trust Fund I Earned Alone

Chapter 4 The Second Call

The call came three days later.

I was in my office when my phone lit up with Mom's number. I'd been back at work for two days, and I'd already forgotten about the party, or told myself I had.

"You need to come home," she said. Her voice was thin. Barely there.

"What's going on?"

"It's your brother. He's been telling people things. About you. About your company."

I leaned back in my chair. On the other side of the glass wall, my employees moved through the office, oblivious. I'd built this place. Every desk, every chair, every terminal. Six years of my life, poured into a business that no one in my family had ever asked a single question about.

"What kinds of things?"

"He's been saying you stole it. The company. That it was your father's, and you took it from him, and now you're keeping it from the family."

I closed my eyes.

"Ryan?"

"I'm here."

"Did you take it? Something that was his?"

"No, Mom. It's my company. I started it. I own it."

"Then why would he say that? Why would he say those things?"

I could hear the tears in her voice. She was trying not to cry, and failing, and I was sitting in an office a thousand miles away, and there was nothing I could do.

"I don't know," I said. "I'll talk to him."

"Please. Something's wrong with him. He's not himself."

He's exactly himself, I thought. He's been himself since we were kids. You just never wanted to see it.

But I didn't say that. I never said that.

"I'll fix it," I said.

After I hung up, I called my lawyer. Diane picked up on the second ring.

"Carter's telling people I stole the company from him."

"People? What people?"

"My mother. Probably her friends. Probably anyone who'll listen."

Diane was quiet for a moment. "You have the incorporation documents. You have the cap table. You have every contract from day one. You have my entire file."

"I know."

"So let him talk. It's on the record. It's not on you."

"Except it is."

She didn't answer. She didn't need to. We both knew what this was. Not a legal problem. A family one.

That night I went home and pulled the old files out of the safe I keep in the back of my closet. The incorporation documents, dated eleven years ago. The first term sheet. The first employee contract, back when there were three of us and we shared one office and slept on the floor. The old bank statements. The old pay stubs, the ones from the paper company where I'd worked for two years while I was starting the firm at night.

The paper company.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed, and I looked through the whole file, all of it, the entire life I'd built out of nothing. And I found it, eventually. A single pay stub, three years old, from the job I'd had before this one. The one I'd told my mother paid me thirty-eight hundred a month.

The number on the stub was different. It had a comma in it. Two of them, actually.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I got up, put the file back in the safe, and went to bed.