Dare (12 page)

He at least zipped and buttoned his pants before sliding out, giving me a last mournful look before I slammed the door. He just stood there, perhaps weighing what he should say next, until I turned my truck on and revved the engine.

“Move your fucking car!” I screamed at him, only vaguely aware that tears were streaming down my face.

He finally obliged.

I got home confused and angry, with both Sebastian and myself. What was he doing to me? How did I keep finding myself with him? I knew that we were too different from each other to ever work well together. Our backgrounds were different, our motivations were different, and yet, we were yanked helplessly together, time and time again. It had to stop this time. It was soul crushing.

The only thing Sebastian wanted was the farm. He didn’t want me; he wanted a piece of property that meant everything to Dad. That meant it was important to me, too. Dad deserved his happiness. He deserved this farm. Sebastian had to have everything he ever wanted. He was a billionaire, for crying out loud. Why did he have to have the farm, too? It just didn’t make sense to me. It made me suspect that Sebastian was just an entitled brat, snapping up properties because he thought he could and should.

I opened the front door to the house and flicked the light on. “Dad? Are you home?”

I was late again from a delivery, late because of Sebastian, yet again, but Dad wasn’t here to grill me on my whereabouts. He always tended to worry when I deviated from the schedules and timetables that he’d devised for me, so I was expecting an interrogation.

“Dad?” I frowned at the clean kitchen. He should’ve been cooking tonight. He’d insisted that he wanted to cook. I got my first bothersome doubt, one that wiggled into my heart. Was he okay? Was everything okay?

The light was on in the dining room, though the door was closed. The office was kind of Dad’s sanctum, so I avoided bothering him when he was in there, but his apparent absence made me pierce it.

“Dad?” I wrinkled my nose. The office was cluttered enough to make me want to haul a garbage bag in there and get to work tidying up, but I had to trust that Dad had a system.

I couldn’t help but glance at the spread of papers on the desk as I looked around. Lots of them were covered with red and capital letters.

The one that stopped my heart all but shouted, “FORECLOSURE WARNING” on the page.

“What in the hell?” I muttered, looking over the rest of the papers. Many of them said the same thing over and over again, that payments were behind, foreclosure was imminent, and savings were tanking. What was all of this? Many of them were dated recently, but others were much older. How long had Dad been sitting on the news that our farm was going under? And when was he going to tell me that my childhood home and our livelihood were being threatened?

I pored over everything, sitting down at the desk and trying to understand what was going wrong. There was paperwork dating back years—while I was still in college—that warned of the inevitability of all the other warnings. These notices were peppered with bank statements. My mouth dropped open slowly. Where was the money? Where was the money from our deliveries? I knew that we hadn’t been turning a significant profit, but I thought we’d been making enough to pay the bills. These piles of paper showed that I was wrong. Accounts had been consistently overdrawn, creditors had been in contact with Dad for longer than I cared to consider, and there was a sheaf of credit card statements and loans. What was going on? How had I never known anything about this? How could Dad have hidden this from me for so long?

“Rachel…?”

I whirled around from the desk to see Dad standing in the doorway to the office. His face looked ashen. He knew exactly what I’d found.

Not caring if there was a system to this madness anymore, I grabbed a handful of bills and brandished them in his face.

“What is this?” I demanded. “What is going on here? Are we losing the farm? Are we in trouble here, Dad? Because I can read. All of this shit says we’re in trouble.”

“I didn’t want you to worry about it as much as I was worrying about it,” he tried to explain, but I was having none of it.

“I am not a child anymore. I am in this business with you, right at your side. You have to let me help you. You have to be honest with me about what’s happening.”

“How could you help this?” Dad asked, sweeping his arm across all of the notices and warnings. “All you would’ve been able to do is worry about it. I want you to be happy.”

“I’d be happy if I knew that everything was okay, but it’s not.” I showed him one of the papers. “What possessed you to take out a short-term loan to pay off a credit card? Where were you going to get the money to repay the loan shark?”

“I don’t need a lecture from you,” he told me. “I did what I had to do, in the moment.”

“Dad, this kind of thing just isn’t sustainable,” I said. I was still angry, but now I felt like crying. Couldn’t he see? We might’ve been able to deal with the costs of maintaining the farm, paying our bills and our workers and everything else, but with the loans and the credit cards, things were looking very grim.

“I did what I had to do, Rachel,” he said, adamant, and suddenly it all made sense.

The statements that had dated back to when I was in college. The debt that had been growing ever since. All of our profits drowning in the black hole of interest rates and late fees.

“This is my fault,” I said.

Dad shook his head. “No, it isn’t. This isn’t your problem.”

“This is my problem because I’m the cause of it,” I said. “You told me to pick whatever college I wanted. To go where I wanted to go. But there wasn’t enough money to go to my school, was there?”

I’d gone out of state at his urging—not that he particularly wanted me to leave the state for college, but he’d seen how excited I was after I got back from a campus visit. And I had grown immensely during college in both knowledge and wisdom. It was one of the best times of my life.

But it had tanked the farm. I had tanked the farm.

“Rachel, I would do anything for you. I’m your father. I wanted you to enjoy your academic experience.”

“I didn’t want to enjoy it at your expense,” I said, wounded deeply. “You should have been honest with me. I would’ve gone somewhere else.”

“You had a good college experience.”

“I did. But I could’ve had it elsewhere, and not at the expense of the farm.” I rested my face in my hands briefly before looking back up at him. He looked like he was going to be sick. “Why didn’t you let me get student loans? Why did you insist on paying?”

“Because I didn’t want you to have to go through paying all that back,” he said. “I know how badly it can go. You’d have been paying off that debt for years.”

“But the farm!” I cried. “You killed the farm trying to give me what I wanted. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to save it.”

He leaned heavily against the doorframe, his face shiny with sweat. “This is why I want you to let me worry about these kinds of things. I own this farm. Not you. I’ll solve this.”

“I have some money in my savings account,” I tried.

“No, damn it.”

“This is my farm, too. And my home. I can do something to relieve a few of the bills. Let me help.”

Dad—stubborn as ever, too stubborn to admit he needed help when he was going under, his pride always in his way—only shook his head. I couldn’t believe he would be so hardheaded. Feelings raged inside of me, a rising tide of resentment that he had kept me in the dark on this coupled with incredulity at my own naivety. How had I been so stupid to trust him? Why hadn’t I done my own sleuthing into costs and finances and loans before going to college? He had given up on his dream for some misguided belief that I would only be happy at a certain school.

I was at war with myself, still clutching all of those foreclosure notices and credit warnings and bank statements. Would the end of the farm be a blessing in disguise? Or would it be the end of my happiness as I knew it?

I had to consider my mother in this moment, and the email she’d sent me. Was this the opportunity that she’d spoken of? Was this my chance to escape the farm? Had she known what kind of financial trouble it had been in when she wrote that? I found it hard to believe that Dad would’ve told her anything about what was going on, that he might’ve maintained contact with her about anything.

Did I really want to leave the farm? My mother had again mentioned dreams, and I had to confess that I didn’t know what mine would be.

And then my mind turned to Sebastian. He’d offered to buy the farm, and Dad had turned him down—pride usurping reason. Sebastian would’ve figured out very quickly that he’d purchased a lemon, but at least Dad would’ve been out of it. Why hadn’t he sold then?

It seemed that Dad still firmly believed that he could pull the farm out of its precarious debt, which was a delusion so enormous it made me worry about his mental state. How could he overcome all of these warnings and threats? It just wasn’t possible anymore.

“Why didn’t you sell the farm to Sebastian Clementine while you had the chance?” I asked quietly.

“What?” Dad looked at me. “Why would I have done that?”

“Because the farm’s going under, Dad.” I sighed, putting the papers back down on the desk. “These papers show it. You know it. And now I know it. You could’ve sold the farm to Sebastian. He wanted you to. He wanted to help, didn’t he?”

Dad narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about it?”

It seemed to be a night for revelations. I wasn’t about to sit here and accuse Dad of keeping secrets while still holding close to one of my own.

“I’ve known Sebastian Clementine for longer than you realize,” I admitted. “We were already acquainted when he visited the farm and you made me give him a tour.”

“How?” Dad looked confused, derailed, and like he needed to sit down. But I couldn’t let him off the hook yet. He’d lied to me and kept this from me. We needed to move forward, to find some kind of solution. Was Sebastian going to be the solution? Only time would tell.

“It was Sebastian who caused the wreck with the truck on the highway,” I said. “He was in a hurry. He was the one who cut me off that day. He gave me his card, but I hadn’t heard from him. So I went and found him. In his office at Clementine Organics. I wanted to get him to pay for damages to the truck, but not everything went according to plan…and we’re more
involved
than you thought.”

“You’re involved with Clementine,” Dad said, almost wonderingly. “Romantically involved?”

“Well…” How was I supposed to tell Dad that the extent of my “romantic” relationship with Sebastian was not much more than angst-filled pining, furious kissing, and our most recent hate sex in the cab of the truck?

“You were involved when he tried to buy the farm?”

“No, I mean yes, I mean…shit.” I rubbed my face as if the physical action would help me unscramble my brains, only vaguely aware that Dad hadn’t said anything about my foul language. “I’m trying to say that yes, I knew him before he came out to the farm that day, and that yes, we were kind of romantically involved, a little bit, but that when he tried to get me to help convince you to sell him the farm, I said no. That I wasn’t involved in that. I had no idea. He made me angry when he told me what he planned to do. I told him to go to hell.”

“That’s my girl.”

I shook my head at Dad, keeping him from saying anything else. “I might’ve told him something different if I had known, at that time, what the real situation here on the farm was.”

“You mean to tell me that you would’ve sided with some stranger against me?” Dad asked, visibly wounded. “Really, Rachel? After everything?”

It broke my heart, but I kept my head high. “Yes, after everything. Because I care about this place. No matter how hard my mother tries to convince me otherwise.”

His face got grayer. “Your mother?”

And with that, the other cat was out of the bad. It didn’t matter anymore. I was ready to just let it all hang out, clear the slate, find some way we could start over and begin moving forward again. I didn’t see a way yet, but maybe it would become apparent soon.

“I emailed her after you gave me her contact information that night,” I told him. “She emailed me back and tried to convince me to leave the farm, saying that I’d never make it anywhere if I stayed. That I’d be forsaking my future. My dreams. My happiness.”

I couldn’t have done more damage to Dad in that moment if I’d conked him over the head with a two-by-four. He looked like he was going to be sick.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” I asked him gently. “Is that what you want to know? If I thought about leaving?”

“You should go,” he said, his voice weak. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”

“That’s the point, Dad. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here. The farm is my home. I care about it, and I care about you. We have to do something to save it. Anything. What were Sebastian’s terms? What kept you from accepting them? We can negotiate something. He mentioned that you’d still be in charge.”

“We’re not selling the farm to Clementine,” Dad said hoarsely. “Absolutely not. That’s out of the question.”

As much as I hated to admit it, Sebastian had been the only way forward I’d seen. He was actually eager to buy the farm, would probably still be keen on it even if he saw the kind of trouble it was in, and seemed genuinely interested in its mission. And I knew that he’d probably forget about how rude we’d been to him out of outrage and go on with his proposal.