Valle Mar was our first big project outside of residential buildings. It was a deal with a Costa Rican company to build four environmentally friendly luxury hotels on the Pacific coast of the Central American country. Cecilia and I had courted the family who owned Valle Mar—and the beachfront land where the hotels would be built—for a year before they agreed to hear our pitch. They’d turned down some of the biggest developers in Europe and the States, but my stepmom and I had leaned in hard to our Latinx roots and the fact that Ganas was also a family business and managed to woo them. We were only a month away from closing the deal. It was my—and Cecilia’s—baby. The first big negotiation we’d done without my father in the lead. Except it seemed that his shady landlord past was coming back to haunt us.

“What do you mean?” I asked, as I forced myself to release my phone from my hand before I cracked it.

“They want the official report on what happened. They want the paperwork from the settlement.” My father’s shoulders slumped and I could see there was more bad news coming. “They’re worried if any of this resurfaces when we announce the deal that it could affect their brand.”

I ran my hands over my hair as I tried to smother my annoyance at my father. It had taken me and Cecilia years to put my father’s shitty past dealings behind us, but there was always something that cropped back up. Hunter Gardens was one of Ganas Corp’s first properties. My father’s business partner had managed it. It was a twenty-unit building in Woodside that had gone up in flames when a space heater a family was using to keep their apartment warm had caught fire in the night. It was bad enough that they’d let those families go without proper heating in the middle of winter, but it came out that the tenants had been filing dozens of complaints with the city about the lack of heating that were never addressed.

It had been a huge fire in the middle of February and though everyone had gotten out without incident, the families had been traumatized. My father parted ways with his old business partner after that and settled with the families to repay them for their losses. But he also acquired a reputation as a negligent landlord that almost twenty years later he still couldn’t fully shake.

“This is going to take some finessing,” I bit out as my mind reeled. This was the last thing I needed right now.