Merged And Married

Episode Three

The Orville sits elegantly between the most magnificent shrubs Beverly Hills had to offer. It's a three-storey mansion with a lot of bedrooms and way too many bathrooms. The water bill runs high every month and no one does anything about it. The house was built by Frederick Weissman himself when he was only a little above the age of forty. He'd always bragged about it to anyone who wanted to give him the time of day.

"You know how hard I had to work for The Orville to stay the way it is, right now?" He would say to Jackie's parents, who also live in The Orville with him, to Jackie herself whenever she wanted to talk about something completely unrelated. To visitors and people who came for the occasional lavish dinners Frederick threw.

"If I hadn't been as hardworking, we'd all be celebrating my birthday in some dumpster downtown, right now." Frederick had announced during the dinner of his seventy-fifth birthday. A wave of casual applause had swam through the audience that night but to Jackie and her parents, it was just a normal Tuesday.

As Jackie turns off the ignition to her car when it's perfectly parked in the extended parking garage, she starts to gauge her options and who to face first. Her parents or her grandfather?

She tries to come up with several defenses and plausible excuses to whatever question or passive-aggressive comment that is going to be passed at her. Before going into another spiral, she climbs out of her car and heads inside, ready for the worst.

"Welcome, Miss." Gavin, the butler, had greeted her the minute she stepped out of the foyer and into the first living room.

"How's it going, Gavin?" Jackie asks, her voice floaty and casual.

"Oh, I'm fine." Gavin replies, watching Jackie throw her keys into the nearby key chamber. "You, on the other hand…"

Jackie sighs in defeat. "He knows?"

"Fergman called him twenty minutes ago. Told him you had a guard dog with you who almost tore him into pieces. He's been fuming since then." Gavin announced, his voice as monotonic as possible, as if he isn't telling Jackie one of the terrifying news of her life.

"Think it's a good idea to go meet him now?" Jackie asks, playing with her index finger. It doesn't take a genius to know she's terrified.

"He'd asked you to come meet him as soon as you get home."

"And my mom and dad?"

"They went to some fundraiser thing in Oregon." Gavin replies.

"Great." Jackie replies and heads to the nearby elevator.

"He's at the balcony." Gavin says before she could reach for the button.

Jackie draws a sharp breath and steps away from the elevator, as if it is suddenly made of fire. She throws her purse to a nearby sofa and heads towards another door.

After having lived with her grandfather almost her entire life, she knows by now that he only went to the balcony whenever he was upset, it didn't matter what time it was. The giant wall clock near the balcony door rings out loud as Jackie reaches for the doorknob. It's almost ten in the evening. For a minute, she thinks of taking off her coat but decides against it.

When she walks in, Frederick is sitting on one of the rocking chairs facing the large and eerily still swimming pool.

"Hi, Grandpa." She greets, her voice tinged with nervousness.

"Do you know how much it costs to make a reservation at Jethro's? It's one of the best restaurants in town. It's also one of the most expensive too." Frederick starts.

"Look, I'm sorry, okay? He tried to feel me up—"

"I don't want to hear it." Frederick replies, his back still turned to her.

"Well, it was Ethan, who—"

"Of course, blame the poor boy, will you?" Frederick replies again, his voice as cold and still as the swimming pool before him.

"If anything, this is all Ethan's fault." Jackie says again, her voice sullen.

"You f****d up the Fergman deal. You want to make it a double and ruin your marriage with Ethan too? Is that what you're doing?"

"I don't want to marry Ethan, Grandpa." Jackie says, the words coming out of her mouth in a jagged whisper, as if they hadn't been coming out for the past few months when Frederick told her she was to marry Ethan. As if she hadn't been protesting about it since she got the news.

For a minute, there was silence. Cold, dark silence.

"Weissman Incorporated is failing, Jacqueline. In twenty years, there's a chance my company will become a giant pile of dust."

Jackie says nothing. It's the best thing to do when Frederick starts to talk.

"The Fergman deal was supposed to be the rope that pulls us out of the quicksand. It was our saving grace. And now, it's gone." Frederick continues. "Ethan's family are our last hope, now. When you get married to him…"

If. If she got married to him. Jackie doesn't say it out loud, though.

"... There'll be an alliance between our dynasty and theirs. That way, we may not go into the ground afterall. You're not just marrying Ethan, Jacqueline. You're saving the company. You're saving the family. You're saving Weissman. Don't forget that."

Jackie thinks of protesting, giving Frederick the many reasons she could never marry Ethan, the most important one being that she'd never felt an atom of love for him since they'd met. She doesn't have feelings for him, and was running out of ways to mention that. If anything, she hates him. She hates his smug face and his macho savior nonsense, the very thing that had cost her the Fergman deal. After today, she probably hates him even more. She wants to tell that to Frederick. She wants to express just how much he repulses her. How she would rather run away to some place like Iceland before marrying Ethan.

Instead, she says nothing. She retraces her steps and walks back inside, shutting the door and the cold air behind her.