BRING THE CEO DOWN!

4. A LIFE CHANGING CALL

4- A LIFE-CHANGING CALL

ARA

Four years later

I felt very out of sorts that morning. Usually, when I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me when I wasn't hungry, or in pain, or tired, but I didn't feel normal, I liked to say that I felt out of sorts. So I felt out of sorts that morning. Those moods usually came when I was on my period or when I remembered my parents and my family, when the fear of being lonely hit me. That morning, though, nothing was out of sorts. Ironically, I just managed to get every single one of my buildings on rent; my investments were making returns. Things were going very well. I was not supposed to be feeling out of sorts. I was meant to be feeling happy, good, and excited. It was the type of day that I was meant to take Liam out to the zoo; he loved animals, or to Disney World to celebrate, or maybe to buy a new bag, or spoil myself at the spa, but I had no push to do any of those things. I felt out of sorts.

Another reason I felt out of sorts was when I was expecting things to go wrong. Everything was fine; it was all going well. For the past few years, I had been fine; I had been taking each day at a time and losing myself in my child.

I had always wanted a baby, and so I had Liam. Even if I loathed his father, even if I was so angry at my own father for making me marry such a man, I was happy because I had Liam at the end. I wasn't lonely. Yet, it all felt too good to be true. Something was going to happen, and it would ruin what I had for the past few years; it would ruin my happiness and the happiness of my baby. I felt it very deeply. This felt like the calm before the storm.

"Everything will be alright, won't it, baby?" I asked my three year old.

"Yes, Mama," William said smartly. He was so smart for a little boy. When I found out that Fabian was cheating on me, I was to have his baby alone. I desperately wanted to have a child that looked like me. When I found out I was having a boy, it felt like it was all over; I would never have that chance, and partly that was true. At first glance, one would say that William looked exactly like my husband did. I might not have seen Fabian in four years, but he still happened to be my husband, even if I hated the air that he breathed, the ground that he walked on, and the fact that he was in my home, my town, and my city, and I was miles and miles away. William looked like his father; he had his dark hair with a hint of curls, his full lashes and his grey eyes. I did see though that Liam was more than Fabian, so much more; he had my smile. Every time he surprised me with a smile, I could see myself in him. He seemed to cover his hands over his face like I did as a child when I was shy; he also pulled his hair when frustrated; I also did that, and probably all the children in the world did the same, but I could not picture Fabian Lewis doing all that; that was all me. William had my quirks because he was my son.

I really wanted someone to talk to; I should make more friends. I couldn't exactly tell all my woes to my three year old son. My list of friends was limited to the housekeeper I hired when I first stepped into Australia. Nicola had helped me with the baby for the first few months, making motherhood, which would have felt so daunting and severe otherwise, easy and seamless. Nicola still came around, albeit less frequently; she wanted to spend more time at home with her grandchildren. She considered William one of her grandchildren and always told me to take very good care of him, but her actual family was far from Melbourne in Sydney.

I spent most of my time caring for my baby, and when I could, I started to make money. The need for real estate came quickly, I was quite good with things like that, I loved to take something that didn't look as good in the eyes of others, polish it and make it look more beautiful, kind of what I did with myself.

"Mama, I want to pee," Liam said, moving in my arms. We were cuddling and watching a cartoon. I was trying to get as much time as I could with my baby before he went to preschool. I thought about it, keeping him at home until when I had to take him to school. Right now, I didn't have too much to work on, and I could afford to slack off on work if I wanted to. My father left me a trust fund before he died, wise man; it was what I accessed and ran away with. I decided that I needed to leave the country. I wasn't afraid of Fabian following me. I knew that he wouldn't; it wasn't like he loved me. I was afraid that if I wasn't far enough, I would come back; I didn't want that. I needed the distance. The money that my father left for me gave me that freedom.

"Alright, Liam, let's go," I said before taking Liam to the bathroom. As my son was in the restroom, my phone began to ring. I left it in the living room, but I knew that I could call after I was done.

"All done," Liam said, and I smiled.

"Let's go wash our hands."

"Yay!" Liam loved anything that involved water.

I pressed a bottle of soap, and a blob fell to his hand. Liam giggled at that. One thing I loved about my son was that he was always laughing. He made me feel like I had a reason to laugh too.

I put on the tap, and Liam washed his hands as well as he could. I helped him a little, and by the time we were done, I had almost forgotten about the phone call.

"I wanna watch Spiderman and eat puffcawn." I absolutely loved the way he called popcorn.

"And that's what we are going to do, Willy," I said, tickling him. My son burst out in loud laughter. I still couldn't shake the out of sorts feeling from me. Just as I thought about it, my phone rang again. This time, I was close enough and so I picked it up and gasped when I saw the name.

Quincy.

Why the hell was he calling me?

I hadn't been the closest to my brother growing up. I could count the number of times I had spoken to him since I landed in Melbourne. I figured the lack of communication was because we were so far away.

We took the death of our father very differently. Quincy just withdrew in his grief; he refused to speak to anyone; he didn't confide in anyone; he just kept on living his life, except it was almost like he was living alone; there was no community, friends, or family involved in the type of life he was living. Then again, we had never been very close. Even as children, he looked at me as someone that was too small to play with; the age difference of ten years was very hard to shake off. I also had the feeling that he blamed me for the death of our mother. She died when I was around five years old, but she became one since the moment she had me. My birth seemed to weaken her, but there were no diagnoses, and the sickness never went away, and she was sick and sick until she died. And now Quincy was calling me.

I picked up the phone and answered the call. I didn't know what to make of the call, and it was easy to just pick up before I changed my mind.

"Ara, how are you doing? How is William?" Quincy asked. This again was strange. Quincy never called me. He certainly didn't ask how I was doing. He would usually talk about the business that made him call me; he would not care about anything else.

"William and I are doing very fine Quincy. How are you doing?" I asked.

"Something terrible has happened." Well, that didn't take long.

"What is it?" I didn't feel very scared or too bothered about the panic I heard in his voice. I learnt from when I was a small child that Quincy could be very dramatic. On the other hand, I remembered the out of sorts feeling that hit me that morning, throughout the day really. Maybe this was it?

"Your husband is closing down the company," Quincy said with so much hate and anger. I blinked hard. It had been so long that someone was referred to as my husband, so it was quite shocking to hear that. What did he mean by my husband?

"Fabian is doing what?" If we were in agreement about something, it was definitely about how we both hated Fabian. Fabian and Quincy had been close friends when they were younger; it was how my crush on Fabian developed even. Whatever relationship had disintegrated within the past few years. We both hated Fabian Lewis. He was scum of the earth.

"He is closing down Erikson Advertising. He wants to scrap the entire thing. I am not even sure what he wants to do, but he is taking my job and adding it totally under Lewis Entreprises, making it another branch of his own advertising company. It makes no sense!" I didn't understand much of what was going on really, but that didn't matter; it was about Fabian Lewis, and he had no right whatsoever to sell my father's company.

Why had Daddy even let him have the company? Why had he not just let Quincy inherit?

Whatever might have occurred in the past was past; my father would have never wanted this to happen. He would have never wanted his name to be removed from the company. And Fabian was trying to sack my brother? The nerve.

The only reason he even had the company was because we were married, and we hadn't been with each other in years; he didn't have a right to the company.

I was seething. I stood up from the couch and began to pace. This wasn't right. Fabian didn't have the right to come into my life and make me so anxious about everything; he had no right to make me feel so annoyed. He could not just disrupt the normal that I managed to gain over the years.

"Why is he doing this? What does he stand to gain?" I didn't even know why I was asking. I knew Fabian very well; he was a terrible person; he could even be doing this to show me he was the one with power and that he could control my life from where he was.

"It's the money. He has been trying to do illegal things with the company for years, since you left. I wasn't giving him an easy time; I wasn't going to let him just come back and ruin what our father suffered to build. He needs to remove me from the picture right now, just so he can do what he wants to do; if I am no longer there, he can use the opportunity to ruin the company. He has always had power over the company, and the entire staff hates him; they hate that this happening. I have no idea why Dad gave him this company, but he will run it into the ground; I am sure of that." I took in a deep breath and tried to calm myself. All this meant Fabian was going to destroy my father's legacy, that he would put off his employees from jobs.

When I left the US, I felt like I was leaving the company in good hands. Fabian was the CEO of a company much bigger than ours; I always figured that he was a good businessman, even if he was a terrible person all around. It never really occurred to me that he was doing all this through fraudulent means.

"What do we do about this?" I asked my brother, all the while looking at my son, who was tugging on my shorts; he was worried about me. I lifted William for comfort; it was going to be long.

"I have a plan." I knew that I would need all the strength that I had to accomplish this plan.