Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 484(@200wpm)___ 387(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 484(@200wpm)___ 387(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
“That’s not what I mean.” “You’ve talked a lot more lately about how not ‘normal’ I am. And I took offense to that because, for me, this kind of life is normal. Being able to own a house that’s way too big, with the ocean steps away? This is my normal. And I thought you would be happy to abandon everything you used to know and jump straight into living the way I do. Neil and El-Mudad made me realize something.”
She sat through my pause for a moment, finally asking, “Are you going to share this realization with me?”
“Our life together is never going to work if I keep assuming I can force you to understand and accept stuff like multi-million dollar mansions and private islands and, yeah, private jets, even though I don’t have one.”
“Whoa, whoa.” She put her hands out in front of her. “Let’s not be too hasty. I’m not so proud that I wouldn’t accept a private jet.”
The corner of my mouth twitched. That was an extravagance I wouldn’t bend on, and she knew it. “I don’t need one. But as you’ve pointed out before, that doesn’t mean I understand how the other ninety-nine percent live. When I went to college and insisted on staying in the dorms and eating commissary garbage, I was doing that to prove that I was as good as anybody else. That I wasn’t as stuck up and spoiled as the people in the social circles of my youth. And, okay, to bug the fuck out of my mom.”
“She didn’t want you to go to college?” Charlotte sounded skeptical.
I shook my head. “No, she didn’t want Catherine to go to college. At least, not to get anything other than a husband. Mother wanted me to go to college, but she wanted me to live the way a lot of legacies lived. Private homes with chefs and a staff, ‘slumming it’ by having roommates who were the children of people as rich as my parents, but without the pedigree. I thought I was going to be different. I was going to understand the common people. I’ve spent almost two decades truly believing that I’d pulled it off. But I’m never going to pull it off.”
“Truly, you live in a gilded prison. My pure peasant’s heart bleeds for you.”
“I’m baring my soul to you here. Can you not make jokes?” That sounded too defensive. “Sorry. This visit has been eye-opening.”
“For me, too,” Charlotte agreed. “I want to get rid of the full-time staff at our place. It would feel so much more private.”
“They give us our privacy—” I started to argue, then cut myself off. “You know what? I agree. No more staff. Just a cleaning crew that comes in every now and then.”
“And the chef. I’m fine with him,” she said quickly.
“I’m also thinking...” It pained me to even float the idea. “How would you feel about... selling the apartment. Moving somewhere that doesn’t freak you out so much.”
Her eyes lit up. “Can it be something on the ground?”
I hesitated. “That might be a tall order for New York. But we’ll look into it.” Maybe I could deal with a commute, if it made her happy. “And let’s look for something cheaper than where we’re currently at.”
“Having money trouble?” she asked with a sarcastic tilt of her head.
“No. Crisis of conscience.” I pushed myself up and, with nowhere else to go, paced in front of the gold-and-black marble fireplace.
It had the cleanest hearth I’d ever seen. There was no way this room had ever been used, at least not by Neil, El-Mudad, and Sophie.
Fuck, my kind of people were wasteful, weren’t we?
“If I sell it and buy something cheaper, we can give the money to... I don’t know. Something to do with homelessness?”
She watched me as I paced. I was oddly nervous. This was Charlotte I was talking to. She wasn’t going to make fun of me for wanting to spend money on something that did good.
“You could probably house the entire homeless population in the State of New York with your money,” she said quietly.
“I don’t think the apartment will sell for that much. The building has taken a lot of hits in the press and people are kind of turned off—”
“Not the money from selling the apartment. Your money. In the bank account you don’t even know the actual total for?” She said it in a gently shaming tone that I knew I deserved.
I had been living my entire life believing I was a “good billionaire.” But with all this need all around us...was it even possible to be a good person and a billionaire?
“I’m not saying that you have to,” she went on. “And I’m not saying that I think you’re a bad person. But you have so much money, and there’s so much suffering. Getting rid of the staff isn’t going to be enough to make you ‘normal.’”