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By the time Gabe awoke the next morning, Lexi had left the camp. Eighteen hours later, she was back in New York.
The next week Templeton Estates were offered a 5 percent stake in the Elizabeth Center development, at highly advantageous terms.
They turned down the offer.
TWENTY-THREE
MAX WEBSTER WAS ON HIS HONEYMOON.
He and A
Max shouted: “Be careful! Don’t get too close to the edge!” But the wind whipped away his words. A
The other walkers had gone now. They were alone, and the distance between them was growing. A
Max was screaming. “Come back! It’s not safe!”
“What did you say?”
Thank God. She heard me. A
Max rushed toward her. “Lexi, come back. I love you. I’m sorry.” He reached out his hand to pull her to safety, but he was too late. Her fingers slid through his and she staggered backward. She was falling.
Max leaped after her. They were in each other’s arms in midair, the ground rushing up to meet them. Lexi’s features began to morph grotesquely, like melting plastic. She was turning into Eve.
“You killed Keith. You murdered your father. You didn’t really believe you’d get away with it, did you?”
But, Mother, I did it for you. Everything has been for you. Mother!
“Max.” A
She held him in her arms till he calmed down, like a baby. This was the third time this week. Whatever pills Dr. Barrington was prescribing, they evidently weren’t working. When he stopped shaking, she said: “Honey, you need to talk to someone. This isn’t normal.”
Max mopped his brow with the bedclothes and slumped back against the pillow. “I’m all right. I’m a little stressed at work, that’s all. It’ll pass. Go back to sleep.”
The marriage had been Eve’s idea. Everything was always Eve’s idea.
She was berating Max over one of their weekly lunches. “You need an heir. Someone to take over the business and undo all of your mistakes. Someone who can make Kruger-Brent great again.”
“I’m trying, Mother,” Max said weakly.
“You’re failing. Get married.”
Max knew he was a poor chairman. He knew that Kruger-Brent’s once bright light was fading, spluttering out slowly like a dying star. It didn’t help having his mother second-guessing his every decision, bullying him into taking one direction then blaming him when the hoped-for profits failed to materialize.
It was Eve who had insisted that they sell their holdings in the Ukraine: “If there was oil in those fields, they’d have found it by now. Alternative energy, that’s the future. Are you completely stupid?”
Max dutifully sold Kruger-Brent’s five thousand acres to Exxon, investing the money from the sale in a wind farm in Israel. Six months later, Exxon struck oil. A year after that, the wind farm filed for bankruptcy. Eve blamed Max.
“You never drilled that land properly. What do you expect if you do a half-assed job? This is business Max, not some childish game. God help me, you’re your father’s son.”
Eve brought up Keith’s name more and more often these days. It was almost as if she’d transferred the hatred and rage she once felt for her husband onto her son. Max had destroyed Keith Webster, but the monster Keith had created lived on in Eve. Max had done everything his mother wanted. Killed Keith. Betrayed Lexi. Won back Kruger-Brent. But every trophy he brought her was like gasoline poured on the flames of Eve’s hatred. He could feed the fire. But he could never put it out.
Meanwhile, Lexi’s star continued its inexorable rise. No one remembered the sex scandal that had driven her out of Kruger-Brent. When people saw Lexi Templeton today, they thought of glamour, of resilience, of success. No one at Kruger-Brent said it to Max’s face. But the whispers behind his back were deafening:
We made a mistake. We should never have gotten rid of her. Lexi’s the wi
By the time he met A
A
A
“Marry her quickly, before she changes her mind. Get her pregnant.”
Max did as he was told. The wedding was a blur. When he looked at the photographs later, he could barely remember having been there. All he could think about on the way to the church was whether Lexi would show up-she didn’t-and whether his mother’s pleasure with him would last this time.
Max knew how badly Eve wanted a grandchild. For different reasons, A
Only A
“I’m your wife, Max. I’m a woman. Put it inside me.”
“Stop it!” Max loathed hearing her talk this way.
“No, I won’t stop it. Enough is enough.”
“Christ, A
She took him in her mouth. In spite of himself, Max started to get hard. Images, hateful, degrading images of his mother and Lexi, poured into his mind like sewage. “Please stop.” But A