The Five-Year Contract. (#arrangedmarriage)

Chapter 3 - Eleanor Mulroney

Connecticut, Greenwich, 17th November 

Two hours. Two fucking hours.

 It had passed two hours since Tess told me and all her children that my father and their father had died. Even now, it doesn't seem real. I still can't believe that he's no longer here, that he will no longer get home and notice that I'm not here. To then, proceed to march to the Van Lowden's house to drag me back home. Well, that and maybe stay a little longer to talk with Robert and Tess. That what he started doing, since I moved to New York and would come to visit him only on the weekends. Although, I did see him pretty much every day in the office. It was often the times, I was visiting the house next door then staying in ours. Now, I regret all the times I had done that because it meant it was less time I spent with my dad. After losing mom and Sophie, I thought that was it. That was the pain that I was going to carry for the rest of my life. I just didn't know that twenty-two years later, I was adding to that pain the loss of my father. I felt revolted against the world and yet powerless because there was nothing I could do. I could not bring people from the dead. 

"The media already knows," Madison Van Lowden, one of the twins, announces as she walks back into the living room from the kitchen. Breaking completely my train of thoughts. "Gloria had the TV on in the kitchen, and it was passing on CNN. They don't have footage from the accident. They were only passing photos of our dads."

"Hell is going to break loose now." I sighed. 

When you are the daughter of one of the few billionaires the country has, it is difficult for the media to leave people alone with grieve. They did it when my mother and sister died, they would constantly wait for me at entrance of my school or be at the entrance of my father's company. Leaving people alone was not part of their dictionary. That was one of the reason's why my father transferred me to a boarding school in Switzerland where Jack was already attending. There I had privacy and no one bother me with questions about my family. The other was because I looked like my mother. My father died without knowing that his surviving daughter knew that he had send her away because he could look me in the face do to the similarities I have with my mother. That fase lasted a few months, still they were a hard few months because I needed my father support and he wasn't there to give it to me. I had learn to support my grief alone and that was exactly what I was going to do again.

I glance at my phone, who is laid down on the coffee table. I had already putted on mute ahead of what I father where going to be hours of calls and messages. Eventually, I was going to have to pick the phone and answer a few of those messages and calls. Especially the ones from my best friend, Olivia Baron. She must have texted me like one hundred messages by now. 

"Already has." Madison's twin sister, Meredith, replies instead as she walks down the stairs. She had gone up to her room to grab her phone charger. "Jack's door was open, I heard him talk on the phone. I have no idea with whom though." 

So, he had already face the phone. It most probably was the lawyers or someone from the company. It even could be one of our friends, maybe Aaron, his best friend and the husband to my best friend. Yeah, we have friends that are married to one another. Hmm, knowing Jack, he was most probably getting things done and that meant he was talking with someone from Dot Com. Either the COO, Eric Fowler, or Edward McCarthy, one of the most vicious board members I knew and the guy that was constantly wanting Robert's place as Executive Chairman. Well, nothing was stopping him now. My father and Robert were dead and they left two important jobs out in the open, the Executive Chairman of the board and the CEO place. 

"Girls, if you are hungry. I have snacks." Gloria Wilton, the Lowden's cooker, and the sweetest sixty-year-old woman I knew, walked into the living room with a platter full of cheese, blueberries, raspberries, crackers and of course, her delicious chocolate cookies. Seriously, has a kid I would eat way too many of those. "Mrs. Van Lowden said to bring up here."