I Was Always Second. Until I Left. novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Tape

There was a tape player in the top drawer of the rolltop desk.

It was a small silver recorder, the kind with a button you press down with your thumb, and my mother had left two fresh batteries lying beside it in a neat row.

Malcolm checked them with his tongue against the contacts and shrugged.

"She was thorough," he said.

I sat in the leather armchair.

It still held the shape of someone smaller than me, and the cushion smelled like her.

I pushed the cassette in and pressed play.

There was a rustle, and a cough, and a small laugh at the start.

"Is this thing on?" my mother said.

I put both hands over my face.

I had forgotten her voice.

I hadn't known I could forget it, and now it was in the room, warm and a little hoarse, exactly the way she used to read to me.

"Hello, my love," she said. "If you're hearing this, someone has made you feel like the spare. I'm sorry. I knew they might."

Malcolm sat on the floor by the door and didn't say a word.

"I'm going to say this fast, because I'm tired, and the doctors say I should rest, and I never listen to doctors."

She laughed again, softly.

"Here is what's true. I own sixty-one percent of Whitman Wine Group. My family built it, my mother and her father before her, and your father came into it by marrying me."

I took my hands off my face.

"I've left it to you, Gillian. Not to Chandler. Not to Lydia. To you."

The recorder hissed.

"Chandler and Lydia each get fifteen percent when they turn thirty. Your father keeps what he has, and he can run the company until you're twenty-eight. After that, the controlling shares are yours, and no one can sell, merge or hand over the company without your signature."

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