Chapter 3 - The Falling Star
By the third day after Christmas,
the world of Julian Blackwood had turned into a burning wreckage that even his millions couldn't extinguish.
He had tried to enter the Blackwood building in downtown Chicago,
only to find his keycard deactivated and his personal items sitting in a cardboard box at the security desk.
The board of directors had moved with a speed that only comes from a collective fear of a plummeting stock price.
They had seen the DNA evidence,
the proof of the fraudulent trust,
and the recordings of Julian’s disparaging remarks about the company's biggest investors.
He stood on the sidewalk in the freezing wind,
holding a box of pens and a silver desk clock,
while the paparazzi flashed their cameras in his face like strobe lights at a funeral.
"Is it true you're not a Blackwood?"
they shouted,
the questions cutting through his pride like a serrated knife.
"Where is your wife,
Julian?
Did she leave because of the mistress or the fraud?"
He didn't answer,
his face a mask of frozen horror as he realized that the people he had spent years looking down upon were now the ones laughing at him.
He retreated to the mansion,
but even that sanctuary had become a hostile environment,
the power having been cut off due to a "clerical error" I had orchestrated weeks ago.
He sat in the dark,
wrapped in his cashmere coat,
staring at the empty space where the Christmas tree had once stood.
His phone was a constant hum of notifications,
not of support,
but of betrayal,
as Isabel had already blocked his number and deleted every photo of them in Aspen.
She was a shark who could smell blood in the water,
and Julian was no longer a whale;
he was just a piece of bait.
He tried to call his old friends,
the men he had played golf with and closed deals with,
but every call went to voicemail,
the silence of his social circle a deafening indictment of his character.
He was a man who had built his life on the idea of being "untouchable,"
and now,
no one wanted to be within a mile of his shadow.
He found a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen,
the only thing I had left behind,
and drank until the room stopped spinning and the cold stopped biting.
In his drunken haze,
he hallucinated the sound of Harrison’s laughter,
a phantom sound that made him weep with a grief that was more about his own loss than the love of his son.
He realized,
perhaps for the first time,
that he didn't even know Harrison's favorite color or the name of the stuffed elephant he slept with every night.
He had viewed the boy as an accessory to his legacy,
a biological insurance policy that had turned out to be a total loss.
As the night wore on,
the temperature in the house dropped even further,
until his breath clouded in front of his face like the smoke of a dying fire.
He was a king without a kingdom,
a father without a child,
and a Blackwood who wasn't even a man.
May you like
The first cracks in the empire had become a canyon,
and there was no bridge left to carry him back to the life he had stolen.
