mistakenly thought that gaining a first-class degree from MIT would finally garner his father’s respect. If not respect then at least something more than the distaste that seemed to be his father’s default emotion towards him.
His father had calmly sat at his desk and flipped through the pages and pages of analysis and reports Raul had completed, then, still calm, had walked to his office window, opened it, and thrown the pages out onto the street below.
Then he’d turned back to his son and said, ‘That’s what I think of your ideas.’
After twenty-two years of Raul’s being on the receiving end of his father’s relentless criticism, something inside him had snapped. He’d walked out of his father’s office without a word, returned to the family home, packed his bags, and left, using the small cash inheritance he’d received when Nestor died to rent an apartment and invest in a friend’s fledgling technology business. He’d recouped his investment in three months and immediately set out to invest in another.
He’d spent his entire life striving to be the perfect son his father wanted; now he was going to be the man he wanted to be. What he wanted above all else was to be nothing like his father.
As his business had grown, not once had his father asked any questions about it. Raul had no idea whether he had been pleased or disappointed that his only son had bailed on the family firm. When they had been together as a family no one had spoken of or alluded to it; not even his mother, who came from a wealthy, high-society family in her own right. So long as Raul had still played at being the dutiful son, kept the perfect Cazorla face intact, joined them at important family functions and kept the family name away from the scandal rags that had been good enough for her.
He was pulled out of his reminiscences when a dark blue minibus drove into the grounds and pulled up beside him. He paid little attention to it until he caught the figure getting out of the driver’s side.
While he was processing the image of Charley driving a minibus, she spotted him and, unsmiling, held up a hand and mouthed, ‘Five minutes.’
He shoved his door open. ‘We need to leave now. You’re late enough as it is.’
‘I did warn you,’ she replied with a nonchalant shrug. ‘I need to drop the keys back in and sign off. I won’t be long.’
She hurried off in her jeans-clad legs and disappeared through the double front door.
He could still hardly believe his wife was wearing jeans. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her in a pair before.
When he’d refused to take her back to her house in Valencia the night before, although promising to get her to work on time that morning, she hadn’t argued. He’d been quietly satisfied that she was adapting to his authority well, right until he’d discovered her missing. She’d returned a couple of hours later with a bag of shopping, saying, ‘You can hardly expect me to go to work wearing Chanel.’ Thus she had proceeded to take herself off to one of the spare rooms she’d appropriated for her own use, locked the door, and refused to come out until the morning.
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