If she knows one thing about me by now, it’s never to talk about my lost past with Harley as a permanent thing.

“But you have to move on, Aerin! You have to move on from that! And I thought you wanted to move on with me!,” she asked in a more demanding voice now. “I’m here! In the flesh! In front of you! In your life!”

“I know. I know that you’re in the flesh. And you know that I’m trying, Lys. I’m trying to move on, to reconcile what happened to me to what I can hope to have in the future …” I answered, and then faltered.

“You have to try harder, then!” she exclaimed, banging her fists softly on the bed.

What the hell is happening here? Why is she making me go down this road? Why is she challenging me on this? I told her already … this is the one red line that she couldn’t cross! FU&*^(%K!!!

“How could you do this?!” I asked, mad as hell now and close to tears at the same time.

“How could you force me to forget?!”

She shut her eyes, and then, after what felt like eons, she leaned over and held my face between her hands.

“How could I not, Aerin?” she asked quietly.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Harley

Two years after the incident

“Matt, I’m stuck in that meeting with their lawyers here,” I told him during a break in the negotiations that I was completing between Matt and the representatives of a sovereign wealth fund based in northern Europe.  I was being supported by Percy’s law firm – the one that I’d hoped to join as a bright, young, eager-beaver associate many moons ago.

Matt was divesting himself of his interests in an off-shore drilling interest, on my advice, because I thought that his holdings needed to be carbon-free or at least neutral if, over time, he wanted to attract more of the new types of money that were conscientious about limiting carbon investments in joint ventures. Plus, increasingly, we had culled and pruned his interests to be oriented towards “legacy” issues supporting climate-smart investments .

I teased him that he was “legacy shopping,” and he didn’t push back. Who was I to complain? I couldn’t fault him for evolving that way, as an investor. And, bottom line, I would much rather be involved with a company that had those kinds of values than one that didn’t.