But it isn’t Sebastian, and it isn’t Cyrus either. Instead, it’s someone I actually like to hear from. My mother, Alexa Hartman.
“Hey mom,” I mumble blearily into the receiver. “What time is it?”
She tsks impatiently. No doubt she’s already been awake for three hours. She’s probably meditated and done her yoga, and eaten her scrambled egg whites or a kale smoothie. She has more energy than someone half her age. “It’s nine thirty,” she says. “Why are you still in bed?”
“I had a rough night.” I wince as I hear how whiny I sound.
“Why?” Her voice is dry. “Did some numbers on a spreadsheet not add up?”
My mother is very free-spirited. She was protesting something in Central Park when she bumped into my conservative, businessman father. It was love at first sight, she says fondly, when asked about it. They were married for thirty years, and they made each other incredibly happy every single day. Growing up, my grandparents and Uncle Cyrus would lecture me about the family legacy, but my parents would just laugh and tell me to do what made me happy. “I did,” my father would say, squeezing my mother’s hand. “Best decision I ever made.”
“I met a girl,” I answer her question. “Then I said something stupid and chased her away.”
“What’d you say, Danny?” she asks.
Even though my mother is unlikely to judge me, I’m not going to tell her that I’m sharing women with Sebastian. It takes me a minute to formulate my thoughts. I fumble my way out of bed and into the kitchen on autopilot, seeking coffee.
“We are trying to buy a company and Cyrus thought I should keep a low profile.” I grimace at the memory of what a dick I’d been last night. “So I told her to keep our encounter out of the tabloids. Not surprisingly, she walked out on me.” My head feels like there are a bunch of dwarfs with very tiny hammers inside my brain, digging for gold. Aspirin. There has to be aspirin somewhere in my apartment.
She hisses in anger. “Daniel Stuart Hartman,” she snaps at me. “I thought your father and I raised you better than this. Is this how you talk to a woman?”
“No mother.” I feel about ten, waiting to hear that I was grounded. “I’m sorry.”
She sniffs. “Yes, well, there’s not much point apologizing to me, Danny. What is wrong with you? Should you be listening to Cyrus for dating advice? Cyrus, who has not had a single meaningful relationship in his life?”
Okay, she has a valid point. I tell her that, and she snorts. “Of course I do,” she says. “So Cyrus told you that the family firm had been around for hundreds of years, and your only role was to pass it down safely to the next generation, and you listened to him and scared away some poor woman?”
“More or less,” I concede.
“Yes, well, what next generation?” she asks sharply.
Oh, there’s not enough aspirin in the world for this particular conversation. “Go bother Susan if you are going to start badgering me for grandchildren,” I tell her. Thanks to the coffee, my wits are slowly returning to me. “I’m not interested in kids.”
“Yes, honey,” she says. “I know that. This isn’t the grandkids lecture, this is a different lecture. Cyrus is miserable and alone, and the company is his entire life only because there’s nothing else to fill it. If you start listening to him, you’ll end up in the same place.”
“Trust me,” I rub my throbbing forehead, “I already feel like shit. The yelling isn’t necessary. Did you call for some specific reason, by the way, or do you have some kind of maternal voodoo instinct that tells you when I screw up so you can lecture me?”
She chuckles. “I called to remind you that we are having drinks this afternoon with the President of NYU to discuss the endowment the Hartman Foundation has been planning to make to the school.”
“Shit, I forgot.” I’m dropping balls all over the place. “What time was that?” As I speak, a glimmering of an idea occurs to me. I need Bailey to forgive me, and in order for that to happen, I need something good. Something big and bold.