The company went public.
At the celebration gala, Prudence Pruitt kissed her male assistant, Richard Gilbert, in front of everyone.
She produced a diamond ring and gazed at Richard, her voice soft with feeling. "You're the lucky star heaven sent me. Without you, I wouldn't be where I am today."
"Darling, marry me. Will you?"
Richard nodded, flushed with excitement, and once the ring was on his finger he turned to throw me a smug, mocking smile.
I just calmly slipped out my phone and made a call.
"Dad, I miss home."
On the other end, my father laughed. "Is this about getting the family to invest in that girlfriend's company again?"
"No problem. We'll put in a billion this round, and more if that's not enough."
"But son, are you still not planning to come clean with that girlfriend of yours about who you are?"
I drew a slow breath. "It's not about investing. I want the family to pull out of her company. Withdraw every share."
...
That line left my father stunned silent on the other end.
He spoke carefully. "Son, did the two of you have a falling-out?"
"Prudence's company just went public. This is exactly the moment for it to take off. If our family pulls out now, her company might be delisted before long—"
I cut him off, teeth clenched. "She just proposed to her male assistant at the celebration gala."
Something crashed on the other end, loud enough that he must have hurled it, and then he was roaring that he'd sink Prudence in the river and feed her to the fish.
After I hung up on my furious father, I noticed plenty of people at the gala watching me with strange looks. Some pitying, some openly delighting in it.
They murmured among themselves, pointing my way.
"I really thought Prudence would propose to Ernest Maddox in front of everyone today!"
"Right? After all these years it was Ernest who stayed by her side, who went through thick and thin with her all this time. Who'd have guessed she wouldn't choose to marry him in the end."
"If I were Prudence, I'd pick Richard too. He's got a wide network. There's so much he can do for the company down the line."
"Exactly. In the grown-up world, pure love is a joke. It's all about interests."
"Ernest has no money, no background. Aside from knowing Prudence longer than Richard did, he's got basically nothing going for him."
"I heard the only reason the company managed to go public was Richard pulling strings through his connections. Apparently some elder of his knows a cousin of the Maddox family. Once they got connected, the Maddoxes put in five hundred million, cleared up some of the company's troubles, and got it onto the market without a hitch."
"The Maddoxes? You mean the richest-family Maddoxes?"
"Goodness, Richard really has it in him, getting connected with the Maddoxes like that. No wonder Prudence couldn't wait to propose to him at the gala."
While the guests buzzed among themselves, Richard came down off the stage, a glass of wine in hand, and walked right up to me.
He smiled and taunted, "Ernest, I told you a long time ago. Pure love won't put food on the table."
"My family's elders can connect with the richest Maddox family, can take Prudence's career to the next level. And you? Besides becoming her dead weight, what can you do for her?"
"A person's fate is decided by heaven. Take you, for instance. You're a Maddox too, but you didn't have the luck to be born into the richest Maddox family. You weren't born with a young master's destiny. What right does an orphan with no father and no mother have to stand beside Prudence and bask in all that glory?"
