Free No Relation by Terry Fallis

can’t touch us.”
    “Yeah, well, Dad is out of the loop. They’ve made three new acquisitions in the last three months and have an aggressive expansion plan. MaxWorldCorp is poised to start cutting our grass big-time.”
    Marie arrived with the salad and my cake. Oh my gosh, the cake. I had to concentrate very hard to keep my mind on Sarah’s voice when I was eating that cake. I think it was probably the finest piece of chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten. It might have been the finest piece of anything I’ve ever eaten.
    “This is unbelievable. This is sublime,” I moaned.
    “Why don’t you and your cake get a room?” Sarah chided. “You’re making very strange sounds. Try to focus, Hem.”
    “Sorry. This cake is from a different astral plane,” I explained, my eyes closed in ecstasy. “Okay, I’m back now. So, to summarize, you want me to start working the Sarah angle with Dad in the hope of getting us both what we want.”
    “Precisely. I think you’ve got it now.”
    It really wasn’t a bad idea. And what did I have to lose? Well, I guess I had my CEO job to lose, which was exactly what I was looking for. Why didn’t I think of this before?
    “Okay, I’m in. But I don’t think Dad is just going to roll over and hand you the keys to the corner office. This is going to take some time.”
    “I have faith in your powers of persuasion,” Sarah said as she patted my hand. “But when you talk to Dad, this has to be your idea. I don’t want him to think I’m a conniving Machiavellian manipulator.”
    I raised an eyebrow. I must have raised it quite high.
    “Okay, I may be a conniving Machiavellian manipulator. I just don’t want him to think that, yet,” she concluded.
    We shook on it.
    “So how is Dad these days? I’ve been avoiding his calls so I haven’t actually spoken to him for a while.”
    “He’s getting worse. Ever since Mom died, he’s been even more obsessed with the company. It runs his life. It clearly means more to him than, well, than anything else,” she said.
    “Is he still refusing to believe that the 1960s are actually over?”
    “Well, his wardrobe, language, attitudes, and business perspective are certainly stuck in the sixties, if that’s what you mean,” she explained. “And I don’t think it’s helping that he’s spending such an inordinate amount of time with our jackass of a COO , Henderson Watt.”
    “Henderson Watt? Isn’t that your boyfriend?”
    “Bite your tongue,” she snapped. “We dated just long enough for me to get him into the company. Then he stopped courting me and started courting Dad. He’s ambitious to an entirely unhealthy degree. You think I’m ambitious? This guy is in a league of his own.”
    “Doesn’t Dad see through him?”
    “Dad is blinded by this guy’s bright light. No one has been promoted faster. He’s a charter member of the Executive Sycophants Hall of Fame. It would be embarrassing if it weren’t so dangerous.”
    “Dangerous? What do you mean?” I asked.
    “I don’t think he has an original, or even an informed, thought in his head, yet he’s the only one who’s in Dad’s head these days.”
    “Okay, if I’m going to undertake Project Sell Sarah, I need to know who this guy is and where he came from. Just give me the pencil sketch,” I asked.
    “I met Henderson at Dooley’s, where a few of us from marketing go for drinks most Thursday nights. I’d seen him there a few times before. When we finally met, we hit it off. By sheer coincidence, he’d worked overseas for a European skiwear manufacturer but had returned stateside after five years when it looked as if he’d topped out over there. He was looking for work in the rag trade to build on what he’d learned across the pond. I thought his experience in the EU might be useful as I know Dad was contemplating trying to break into the European market. We dated seriously for a few months and all was going well.Then I finally talked Dad into seeing him.