Something Ally said that first evening had hit a nerve, not that she'd intended it to. We'd been waiting for the car to pick us up at the end of the night, and I'd noticed her checking her watch. When I asked if she had an early start the next day, she'd explained that she was running a "design your own T-shirt" session for kids at the local library.

"My job might be unconventional," she'd told me, "but it means I can donate time and materials to causes I'm passionate about."

"And you're passionate about T-shirts?"

"It's more than just the shirts. It's about hope. Some families can barely afford to eat, let alone buy new clothes, plus I'm inspiring the next generation of designers."

Ally gave up a Saturday morning to help underprivileged kids, and what did I do for charity? Rubber-stamped the pre-approved monthly donation to the Carrington Foundation and focused on making yet more money. Hell, I hadn't even known what the foundation did. It was a just a line I trotted out at parties—oh, yes, the Carrington family funds numerous projects through our philanthropic arm, and we're thrilled to help so many worthy causes.

In reality, my father considered the donations a write-off he'd been forced to agree to in his divorce settlement—five percent of monthly pre-tax profits—and a bunch of crusty old trustees did the rest. And my mother, it turned out. She never showed up for shareholder meetings at Carrington Holdings, but several years ago, she'd quietly begun attending the trustee get-togethers and steering the Carrington Foundation in the direction of her choosing. Apparently, we'd been supporting animal rights, needy children, and a number of domestic abuse charities.

Spurred on by Ally's enthusiasm for T-shirts, I'd attended the next trustee meeting with the intention of finagling some cash for the library and come face to face with my mom for the first time in twenty-three years. Nobody could undo that amount of damage over coffee, but we'd started taking baby steps. Lunch, dinner, visits to several of the projects we were funding.

And now she was gone.

A ruptured aneurysm, the ME said. It had been fast.

"You made your peace with her?" Ally asked.

"We were getting there."

"I'll tell your dad we went to Vegas. I'll tell him anything you want. He won't ask me about blackjack, will he? Because I don't know how to play that."

"No, he won't ask." He didn't give a shit about anything a woman had to say. He might chuckle and congratulate me for a Vegas fuck-fest, but he wouldn't care about Ally as a person. As a chip off the old block, I'd always assumed I wasn't capable of caring about a woman either, but Mom had told me I might surprise myself one day. "I'll email you a briefing for the trip," I told Ally. "Wear something black, knee-length. A small heel."

"A hat?"

"It won't be that formal."

Mom had reinvented herself as an artist. She painted what she loved and gave all the profits from her gallery away to local charities, homeless people, and folks with sob stories on Go Fund Me. Dividends from Carrington Holdings had still provided her with a comfortable lifestyle.

"Will we need to stay overnight?"

"I'll check the timings. Is it a problem if we do?"

"My next booking isn't until a week from Friday, so I can be flexible."

"Am I allowed to ask what it is?"

"Another wedding." She made a face. "In Idaho."

"I didn't realise you'd expanded nationwide."

"It's a one-off. The guy lives in California, but his family's farther away. Paisley's always telling me I should travel, so I guess I should be happy, huh? Have you ever been to Idaho?"

"We own a biotech startup in Boise. I go there for meetings on occasion. Have you made travel arrangements, or do you want one of my assistants to take care of that?"

"Uh, my date said he'd book the flights."

Logically, I knew she was running a business, but I still didn't appreciate the way she said "date." I liked having Ally Rockingham at my beck and call. More than once, I'd considered requesting an exclusive contract, but I was afraid that might scare her off. She'd made it very clear that she didn't want any kind of commitment. And I couldn't afford to scare her off because she was excellent at her job.

Fortunately, the waitstaff picked that moment to appear with our appetisers, and I took the opportunity to move the conversation to more pleasant topic: Ally herself.

"How's the T-shirt business going?"

It had taken three dates before she'd confessed that making exes jealous wasn't her main job and T-shirt design was more than a hobby, although her side hustle was more lucrative at that point in time. She hadn't been kidding about T-shirts being her passion. She customised and sold them, with each piece as unique as its creator.

"Better. I took your advice and added a budget range of printed shirts that I'm semi-customising alongside the one-offs. Some folks are buying from both ranges."

"What about the embellished bags?"

"Coming soon." Which I already knew since I'd scrolled through her website on the way over to her place. "I've been hunting through thrift stores for stock, but I'm being real fussy about what I buy. The embellishment will take hours for each piece, so there's no point in starting with a poor quality base product. Plus I need to get some leather paints." She sighed. "What I need is an eight-day week. The more Ally's Closet grows, the harder it gets to keep up."

"Could you hire an assistant? Delegate some of the repetitive tasks?"

"I don't have the budget for that at the moment. My niece takes care of my website, and Cooper helps to pack up orders when I'm desperate, but apart from that, I have to cover everything myself. When I graduate, I'll have breathing space. Who needs sleep anyway?"

My father never stopped reminding me that he got by on four hours a night and therefore I should be able to work twenty hours a day as well, but in the past couple of years, I'd come to realise that there was more to life than the endless pursuit of money. Too bad he didn't. He had an exercise bike in his office so he could call people while he worked out, every dinner had a greater purpose, and his fifth wife was banging the landscaper despite an iron-clad prenup. I'd considered mentioning the affair to him since she wasn't exactly being discreet about it, but ultimately, I'd decided that if he was too blind to see what was going on under his nose, it wasn't my problem. He'd made his bed, and he could lie in it while Crystal rode Julio in the pool cabana.

"Sleep is important. Could you consider diversifying? Adding another income stream like subscription tutorials? If you filmed yourself completing a project, you could sell the finished piece plus the instructions on how to make it."

"What if I lost buyers because they decided to make their own?"

"Two different audiences. Plus you could sell the same tutorial multiple times."

"I'll consider it." Ally took the last bite of her mozzarella arancini. "How about you? Did you buy any new companies this week? Are you closer to world domination?"

"World domination is my father's game, not mine." A waiter hovered in the background, waiting for me to finish my last piece of pan-fried scamorza and put down my fork, and I obliged. "We didn't make any acquisitions, but we finally completed the clinical trials for Dermoxon, and the results were positive."

"Dermoxon is the scar treatment, right?"

"Yes." Unlike the women who'd come before her, Ally took the job seriously enough to listen. "There was an average improvement of sixty-seven percent over the placebo treatment."

"That's awesome!" Ally seemed genuinely pleased for me. Supportive. It was unsettling, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. "You'll be able to help a lot of people, huh?"

"That's the idea."

Although precisely how many people Dermoxon would be able to help depended on what Mom had done with those damn shares. She'd never mentioned her will to me—we hadn't been close enough for that, and she hadn't expected to die at the age of fifty-nine.

I hadn't expected her to die either. There were so many things I should have said and done, but instead, I'd taken things slowly. The sensible approach, I kept telling myself, given my father's animosity toward the woman he'd once claimed to love, but now she was gone and I'd never be able to turn back the clock. Time travel just wasn't possible, although Carrington Holdings had once received an investment proposal from a pair of scientists who swore that one day it would be. The proposal had arrived on April third, and I remembered my father chuckling that they were too late for April Fool's Day before filing it in the trash. Diplomacy wasn't his strong suit.

Nor did it used to be mine, but the image consultant I'd hired after my father promoted me to COO had told me I needed to soften my attitude. Brooks 2.0 was still a work in progress, but I'd discovered that the old saying was true—you caught more flies with honey.