Page 5 of Billionaire Grump

My dad is a moderately successful divorce lawyer, so he intimately knew the loopholes that would get him out of paying real child support. He went out of his way to not only abandon his family but to twist the truth and use his inside knowledge to corrupt the system—just so he could get out of doing the right thing by the people he was supposed to love the most.

The numbers are blurry now and I impatiently brush away tears.

Why did I come here? Cleo was right. This was a huge mistake.

Does he have no heart whatsoever? Did he really care so little for us that he would hide this from us to deliberately make our lives harder?

Does Anita even know about this? Is he planning a second getaway, leaving those little boys in the lurch like he did to us?

Fucker.

My emotions are raw.

I take out my phone and I snap a few more photos. Of the bank statement. The top page and several more. I make sure I’m thorough.

What are you trying to do right now?

I don’t know. Nothing. I just want to make sure I didn’t dream this.

Then I cover the pile back up with some other paperwork. And I scrawl a note.

Dad,

I showed up like I said I would. I came to tell you that Josh is graduating in June. He’s been accepted at Columbia and he’ll be starting there in the fall. It would mean something to him to know that you cared about any of the above. If you can make the effort to call me back, I could give you the details about maybe coming along to his graduation to support all his hard work and amazing achievements.

Your daughter,

Ivy

I leave the note on the white marble table in the white marble foyer of the gigantic house. Then I slam the door behind me.

2

As I ride on the train back into New York, I take a deep breath, doing my best to push the entire experience out my brain. To forgive and forget—again. To not let the twisted rage eat me up. I’m usually good at seeing the bright side of things. I’ve worked a lot on my mindset. Gratitude is always the best way to be positive about life in general, and I have a lot to be grateful for.

But letting my father off the hook again for shutting us out of every part of his life is hard. It hurts. Today it hurts more than it has in a long time.

I guess that’s what I get for trying to force something that he’s made it very clear he doesn’t want to do.

He won’t call, obviously. It’s best to rise above it and put it out of my mind, especially the part where my dad is a deceitful asshole of a multi-millionaire.

There’s no point mentioning any of this to Josh.

In fact, that would be an exceptionally bad idea. It’ll only hurt him if I tell him why I went out there and that, once again, our father hasn’t chosen us. So I do what I’ve done so many times before: I shove the morning’s revelations back into their little cage in my mind, securely lock it and mentally throw away the key. Done and dusted. Time to make peace with it and move on.

When I get back to our apartment, it’s quiet. Josh will have finished his early shift at the café where he works on Saturday mornings. He’s probably holed up in his room by now, working on the three-giant-screen computer set-up he’s got going on in there.

It’s part of the reason I insisted he get a part-time job, just to make sure he gets out of the house on weekends and doesn’t spend all his time coding or whatever it is he does.

I used to worry about how much time he spent staring at screens, like every parent (or close enough) does.

But Josh is savvy enough to know how to handle his time. He has a group of good friends he hangs out with (often gaming with them, but whatever). As long as he’s getting good grades, I don’t bug him about the rest of it.

It was easy to see from an early age that my brother was going places. He almost got expelled from school when he was twelve for hacking into the school’s database and changing all his grades to A’s. But I somehow convinced the principal to give him one get-out-of-jail-free card. Which she did, as long as he promised to use his powers for good instead of evil from now on. She punished him by giving him an after-school job building an online check-out system for the library, which was so good they ended up franchising it and selling it to a few other school libraries. Josh got a cut of the money, which he spent on high-tech computer equipment. He was written up in Young Entrepreneur magazine and put on their “young coders to watch” list.

I encouraged him endlessly to try as hard as he could, to aim high and try to get into a top school that would propel him into the kind of shit-hot job he’s capable of. Maybe I was a little too overzealous at times, but he knew why.

Somehow, it must have sunk in. He ended up getting accepted at Dartmouth, Cornell, Yale and Columbia. I don’t think either of us could believe it at first. He’d really done it.