Chapter 101: His Father’s Witness
Andrew asked for the chair nearest the door.
Nobody commented on it. Stephanie moved a small table so he could sit without catching his supported ankle against it. Ms Chen placed the papers where he could reach them and asked whether he wanted a break before beginning.
“We haven’t started.”
“You can still be uncomfortable before we start.”
He gave a reluctant nod, settled himself, and waited until the ache eased enough to stop taking all his attention.
It was Monday morning. He had spent most of Sunday reading copies of documents he remembered signing in less time than it now took him to understand a paragraph. His own signature appeared so confidently that he hated looking at it.
Stephanie sat beside the window. She had promised not to answer for him. Keeping that promise was proving harder than any argument she had had with Paul.
Ms Chen began with the earliest meeting Andrew could remember.
His father had called it an opportunity to learn how serious money worked. There would be a holding arrangement connected to future property interests. Andrew would not have to manage everything personally. Experienced people would handle the details. He would finally have something to point to when Paul accused him of living on other people’s effort.
“Did you understand the responsibilities?” Ms Chen asked.
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
Andrew looked at his mother, then back at the page. “Not enough.”
The answer sounded borrowed until he added the part that hurt.
“I liked how he spoke to me in front of them. As if I was involved. Usually he talked about me like I wasn’t in the room.”
Stephanie kept her hands still in her lap.
Andrew described signing the initial papers. He remembered being told later that a few confirmations would keep the work moving. One concerned access discussions. He had not visited every property named. He had assumed his father had people handling that side.
“The wording says you understood discussions were advanced,” Ms Chen said. “What did you actually know?”
“That Dad said some owners were nearly agreed.”
“Did you speak to those owners?”
“No.”
“Did you know anyone had refused?”
He stared at the page long enough for Stephanie to feel the answer before he spoke.
“I heard him arguing about one woman. He said she wanted more because she thought the project needed her land.”
“Which woman?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t use her name where I could hear it.”
Ms Chen wrote that down without completing the gap for him.
Andrew rubbed his face. “I still sent the confirmation.”
“Do you remember the words you used?”
He read from the recovered message. He had written that he understood the remaining owners were cooperative and expected the access arrangements to proceed. It was not a signed transfer of somebody else’s land. It was still a statement others might have relied on.
“I wanted it finished,” he said.
“What did you want finished?”
“Being the person he had to explain everything to.”
The room went quiet.
Ms Chen asked more questions about what he had seen, what he had heard, and which statements came only from his father. When Andrew could not remember, she left the answer uncertain. When he tried to make himself sound completely ignorant, she brought him back to the message in his own words.
His mother’s presence did not save him from that. He had asked her there because he was tired of telling each person a version small enough to survive.
At the break, Stephanie poured water and put it within reach.
“Are you disappointed?” he asked.
“Yes.”
His face tightened.
She sat down before continuing. “I am also glad you’re saying it now. Those feelings can exist together.”
“Dad says you think I’m stupid.”
“I think you wanted his approval badly enough to make a poor decision. I understand that more than I wish I did.”
Andrew looked away. “That doesn’t make it better.”
“No. It makes it something we can talk about honestly.”
He drank the water. For a while, they discussed nothing more demanding than whether the chair needed moving again.
After the break, Ms Chen reviewed what could be shared with the relevant inquiries and what required further consideration. Andrew’s account would go through her. He was not agreeing to a public interview or a performance at Bright Way. He would retain copies and have time to correct genuine mistakes before adopting the account as his own.
He asked about the injury and his options regarding Logan. Ms Chen answered separately. Cooperation about his father’s business dealings did not decide what he should do about his ankle. Nobody in the room suggested exchanging one matter for the other.
That was the condition on which Andrew had agreed to meet Logan afterward.
Before Logan arrived, Andrew asked his mother whether she wanted him to forgive the injury so her own relationship would become easier.
Stephanie felt the question like a hand closing around her throat. She answered slowly because a quick denial would not erase why he needed to ask.
“I would like both of you to be less hurt. That isn’t a decision you owe me. I won’t measure your love for me by how comfortable you make this.”
He studied her face, searching for the condition after the reassurance.
“And if I’m still angry next month?”
“Then we talk about next month when it comes.”
He looked down at the supported ankle. “I don’t want every room I walk into to be about this.”
“Neither do I. We can want that without pretending it has already happened.”
When she left him with Ms Chen to finish preparing, he seemed calmer. Stephanie was not. She stood in the corridor and allowed herself the discomfort of knowing that loving both men would sometimes mean accepting a boundary neither of them found convenient.
The meeting took place in a quiet room with Stephanie nearby and the arrangements settled in advance. Logan arrived on time, carrying no gift. He stopped far enough from the chair that Andrew did not have to shift to accommodate him.
“Thanks for coming,” Andrew said, then looked irritated with himself for saying it.
“You asked.”
“I know. Sit down.”
Logan chose the chair Ms Chen indicated. She remained for the agreed part of the conversation. This was not a secret reconciliation arranged between their mothers’ wishes and their own pride.
Andrew looked at Logan’s shoulder. “Still hurts?”
“Sometimes.”
“Mine too.”
Logan nodded. “I know.”
“Don’t say that. You don’t know what it feels like when I stand up wrong.”
“You’re right.”
Andrew had prepared several things to say. The easy acceptance disrupted the order. He looked at the floor, then forced himself to begin again.
“I did things before all this that I haven’t apologized for. Evelyn. The party. How I treated you when I thought you couldn’t do anything about it.”
Logan’s face changed, though he said nothing.
“I’m not saying that makes what happened to my ankle fine,” Andrew added quickly.
“It doesn’t.”
“I know. I need to say both.”
He described the pleasure he had taken in humiliating Logan. Not every detail, not a theatrical confession, but enough that the apology could not hide inside a vague claim that they had both made mistakes. He had wanted to be the man other people looked toward. Making Logan smaller had seemed an easy way to become larger.
“Then you got money,” he said, bitterness returning before he could contain it. “And suddenly everyone looked at you.”
Logan could have enjoyed that sentence. A part of him still did. He let the pleasure pass without feeding it.
“It didn’t make me right about everything.”
“Apparently it made you rich enough to have people explain that.”
“That too.”
Andrew laughed once, unexpectedly, then winced as the movement shifted his leg. The laugh ended before it became comfort.
“I’m sorry for what I did,” he said.
Logan looked at him for a long moment. “I hear you. I’m not ready to tell you the whole past feels different because you said it.”
Andrew nodded slowly. “Fair.”
Then Logan apologized again for the door and the injury, without attaching Andrew’s earlier behavior as a reason. He would cooperate with the appropriate process. He did not ask Andrew to abandon anything, accept money in exchange for silence, or call the matter settled.
Ms Chen watched the exchange without improving it for them.
Andrew finally turned to the reason he had wanted the conversation.
“I sent a message about the access arrangements. I hadn’t checked what I said. My father wanted it, and I wanted him to think I belonged in the room.”
“Your adviser is sharing what you agreed to share,” Logan said. “You don’t have to give me more here.”
“I know. I wanted you to hear that I wasn’t only a name he stole. I helped him make the name useful.”
Logan felt his opinion of Andrew shift in a direction that was neither forgiveness nor contempt. It was harder to dismiss someone who had stopped using ignorance as a perfect hiding place.
“That matters,” he said.
Andrew looked relieved, then angry at the relief. “Don’t thank me like I’ve done you a favor.”
“All right.”
“And don’t tell Mum we fixed things.”
“We haven’t.”
That answer seemed to let Andrew breathe again.
The conversation ended after twenty minutes. Logan left before fatigue made either of them cruel. In the corridor, Stephanie stood beside a window with her phone in her hand. She searched his face but did not ask for a report he had no right to give.
“He’s tired,” Logan said. “He said what he wanted to say.”
“Thank you for listening.”
Logan nodded and stepped aside so she could go in.
Paul called Andrew that evening. The call had been expected, and Andrew followed the arrangements he had discussed with Ms Chen. He did not argue through every document. He said he was giving an accurate account and that requests concerning it should go through his adviser.
Paul called him ungrateful.
Andrew closed his eyes. That word still worked on him. It carried years of school fees, expensive clothes, rides home, praise withheld and occasionally bestowed. His father did not need to invent a debt. He only needed to treat every act of parenting as something repayable in obedience.
“I’m not changing it because you’re angry,” Andrew said.
His voice shook. He hated that. He kept speaking anyway.
Paul said Stephanie had turned him against his family. Andrew looked at his mother sitting across the room, deliberately occupied with a book she had not turned a page of in several minutes.
“Mum didn’t send the message. I did.”
The line went quiet.
For the first time, Andrew understood how useful it had been to Paul for everyone else to keep arguing about influence. As long as the question was who had persuaded his son, nobody had to hear the son describe what his father had asked.
He ended the call when the accusations began repeating. Then he sat with the phone in his lap until Stephanie asked whether he wanted tea.
“I want him to call back and be different,” he said.
Her expression softened with a pain he recognized.
“I know.”
This time he did not object to the words.
Across the city, Logan received confirmation that Andrew’s account and the relevant documents had been supplied through the agreed channels. Ms Bell warned him that the account complicated the picture rather than turning it into a simple story of a stolen signature.
Logan thought of Andrew in the chair by the door.
“Then use the complicated picture.”
He put the phone down and looked at the reply from Merrow awaiting review. A revised proposal had arrived. The remaining dispute could be narrowed, some funds released, and the unsupported claims examined separately. There was still language he would not accept, including a broad statement that might be read as abandoning unrelated complaints.
He sent the marked passage back to Ms Bell.
Tomorrow would bring another argument over terms. Tonight, somewhere else in the city, Andrew had told his father no and remained frightened afterward.
Logan understood that kind of victory better than he would have a month earlier. It did not feel like power arriving. It felt like deciding what to do while the person who once held power still knew how to hurt you.