“What? With you?” Charlie said in shock. I’m going to fucking kill him if he touched her.

“No, come on, Michael would never hurt me, but he completely trashed one of his Porsches. Took a samurai sword and began bashing the hood. I couldn’t bear to stick around and watch.”

“Damn! All because of his issue over who bought the company?” Charlie asked, getting more alarmed by the minute.

“It’s not just that. Things have been bad for him lately. He blew that deal with IBM, he lost the house he really wanted, there was this whole magazine article thing that I won’t even get into, and it seems like all we ever do these days is…” Astrid’s voice trailed off for a minute. I’ve said too much. It’s not fair of me to keep burdening Charlie like this.

Charlie could hear Astrid’s discreet sniffling away from her phone’s mouthpiece. She’s crying. She’s sitting in a hotel room crying.

“I’m sorry, it’s so inappropriate of me to be bothering you with all this when you’re at work.” Astrid sniffled again.

“I’m not really doing much today, but don’t worry, no one can fire me. You know you can call me anytime at all, don’t you?”

“I know. You are the one person who truly understands me. You know what I have to go through with my family. They don’t get what it’s like to have marriage problems.”

“Do you honestly think your brothers are perfectly content in their marriages?”

“Are you kidding me? I think they are all miserable in one way or another, but none of them would ever admit it. No one is allowed to be unhappy in my family. I think only Alex in LA is truly happy—he got away and got to be with the love of his life. It’s just pathetic that Salimah’s not accepted. So ironic, isn’t it, when you think that all the family money originally comes from Malaysia.”

“At least they make each other happy. That’s the only thing that matters,” Charlie said.

“You know, when I visited them a few months ago, I thought to myself, ‘I wish I could do this too.’ Sometimes I wish I could just pack a bag and move to California, where no one knows me and no one cares. Cassian can grow up far away from all the pressures he’s going to have to start facing very soon. And I would be perfectly happy, I swear to God, living in a beach shack.”

I could be too, Charlie thought to himself.

They were both silent for a moment, and then Charlie spoke up. “So what are you going to do?”

“There’s nothing to do, really. Michael will calm down in a couple of days and we’ll go home. If you can help me prove that my father had nothing to do with the acquisition of his company, I’m sure that will go a long way toward making him happier.”

Charlie was silent for a moment. “I’ll see what I can do.”