1 Chapter one:- bartered proposal

"I'm coming, I'm coming!" I yelled, wiping the last bit of clay from my hands as stalked to the door. Someone outside was being awfully OCD with my doorknocker, and if they kept it up Mrs. Andersen from next door was going to leave another passive agressive note shoved in the doorjamb, bringing the total this month to seven. And it was only the fifteenth.

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Exasperated, I ripped the door open. "What?" I snapped automatically. Then my breath caught.

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Jonathan Dare, founder of the multi-million dollar venture capital firm of Onyx Capital, and my biological and nominal father, stood in the hallway.

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"Felicia," he said.

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I slammed the door in his face.

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That was my first mistake. What I should have done was beat him to death with the expired fire extinguisher sitting across the hall-an apparently permanent fixture that had been there since I moved in almost a year ago--but hindsight is twenty-twenty. Instead of committing patricide I very calmly began to root around in my tiny apartment for my phone while my father hammered on my doorknocker. I finally found it on top of a pile of library books that had been due during the last presidential administration. They had been serving time as the bedside table next to my futon. As a starving artist, I had to go with whatever worked.

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I switched on my phone and called my therapist.

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My father shifted to using his fist on the door. "Felicia? Felicia, please!"

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"Shut up, shut up, shut up," »I muttered as I listened to the phone ring. My heart soared at the click on the other end, then plummeted when the canned voice of my therapist informed me that she wasn't in right now, but that blah blah blah she was very sorry, blah blah, strove to serve her blah, leave your blah and blah blah and she would blah blah blah blah, beep.

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"Shit!" I hissed, and only an intense consciousness of exactly what the damn phone was worth kept me from throwing it at the wall.

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"Felicia, I need to talk to you!" In fine New York tradition, my father's voice was barely muffled by the flimsy piece of wood between us.

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"Go away!" I hollered, stomping back to my sculpture. I looked at it helplessly. I suddenly couldn't remember what I was sup posed to be making. Desperately I milled about, gathering materials, rearranging them and thinking, manically, that it was about time I reorganized my workspace. Anything, anything to keep my mind off the fact that my shithead of a father stood outside my apartment. I hadn't seen him in almost four years. In fact, I had barely seen him at all when I was growing up. Once when I was seven he mistook me for the head housekeeper's niece. That's how great a father he was.

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"Felicia.."

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My jaw clenched. "Fuck off! I don't want to talk to you!"

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"Felicia, it's your mother!"

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I froze in the act of rearranging some of my self designed tools.

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Mom.

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Was she okay? I had just talked to her two days ago. She had been fine then.

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I chewed the inside of my cheek.

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A lot can happen in two days, I thought.

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I shouldn't have opened the door. I knew better. My therapist, whose advice T could both ill-afford and ill-afford to disregard, had taught me all about setting boundaries with my family. Preferably, she had said, an official international boundary. But I hadn't listened, had I? And now my father was here. Talking about Mom.

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Taking a deep breath, I opened the door. My father started, pausing in midpound.

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"What about Mom?" I demanded.

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Relief flickered over his face. "We need to talk," he said.

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"We can talk here," I told him. "And you can make it quick." It was the sort of decisive, ruthless command that would have made him proud of me, once upon a time.

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Instead, to my utter horror, he burst into tears.

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I stared at him. I had never, ever seen my father cry. In fact, if you had asked me five minutes earlier if he were capable of it, I would have told you that reptiles couldn't produce tears.

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I stood in the doorway, wavering, my heart in turmoil. He was a shitbag, sure, but he was my shitbag father. And he didn't look so hot, now that I had time to study him. His hair, usually so meticulously combed, was in disarray, and his stupidly expensive Italian suit was wrinkled as though he had slept in it. It looked too big on him, too, and I was shocked to realize that he had lost weight. Jonathan Dare had always been a robust man, a college football star gone slightly to seed. Now he looked like a man wearing my father's skin, draped over a bony frame I didn't recognize.

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Glancing back over my shoulder at my unfinished work, I hesitated.

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My father saw my moment of weakness. Another mistake. He pounced.

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"Felicia, please. We have to talk."

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I was going to regret this. I knew it. Nevertheless, I found myself giving in to him, like I always did. Because I wanted him to love me. Because I needed his approval. Apparently knowing this wasn't enough to fight it.

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"Fine," I said. I grabbed my keys and purse from beside the door, and stepped out-side. "Let's get this over with.'

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I took him to the local coffee chain, which I hated, but I didn't dare take him to Rick's or Shade's Cafe. I didn't want his presence to taint the places I actually liked.

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"Okay," I said as we sat down across from each other at dark wooden tables care-fully designed to look intimate and indie.

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"What's going on?"

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He stared down at the cup in his hands, and I tried not to do the same. I'd noticed the significance of his order the second he'd placed it: smallest size, black coffee. The cheapest thing on the menu besides water.

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My father never ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. He always said that looking poor invited being poor. That little cup of coffee between us on the table sent alarm bells clanging in my head, even more so than his tears. He could have been crying just to manipulate me, but appearing poor?

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Something was definitely very wrong.

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"Felicia, I need your help," he blurted suddenly. "Everything's gone all wrong, and I can't fix it. I need you, you're the only one who can do it. Please, Felicia."

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