I’ve called him Uncle James since I was four years old.
He’s not my uncle. He’s my father’s best friend and business partner, forty-two years old, built the way men are built when they have a personal trainer and something to prove.
He walks into rooms and people stop talking.
Three years ago he stopped coming around and nobody would tell me why. Now I’m twenty-one, interning at his company, and he’s spent three weeks pretending I don’t exist.
I stay late on a Thursday to finish a report nobody asked for. His light is still on at eleven. I knock.
He’s behind his desk, tie loosened, a whiskey he’s been nursing. He looks up at me in my sundress and something crosses his face that he kills before I can name it.
“I finished the Calloway analysis,” I say, setting the file on his desk. “Th
