He raised his head to look into her eyes, then said quietly, “You’re a big girl, Melanie.  You can decide what you want to do.  You’re afraid of what will happen if I lose my money?  Are you hedging your own bets now?”

“Logan, I…,” Melanie began to say.

“No….no…no more.  I don’t want to hear about your doubts anymore.  I don’t want to hear about what your parents are trying to make me do, through pressuring you.  I’m not going to force you to stay, if you want to go.  Our marriage was never like that, Mel.  And I’m tired of trying to make you understand that there’s more to me, more to the life I want to share with you, than money.  That’s your parent’s marriage.  That’s everybody else’s marriage, or everybody’s  that we know of.  That’s not our marriage.  Or at least, I don’t want it to be our marriage.”

Then Logan turned away, saying over his shoulder, as he grabbed the whiskey bottle.   “Look, if I’m right, we’ll probably know before the year ends.  And the year is half-way over, so it won’t be that far away. You can stay for the rest of the year, and stick with me to find out.  Or you can go. Go back to your parents, if you choose.”

He turned to cross the main hall, heading towards his office.  He had set up an adjoining bedroom next to his office, since he and Melanie started arguing, about this, and various other things.  He was tired of the conflicts, and of her parents constantly on her ear, expressing doubts about him at every turn. 

It seemingly didn’t matter that he’d amassed hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, eclipsing their holdings in the meantime.  He flipped his computer on, and quickly studied the analysis his team had sent him. He punched in a few codes to order them to place another$5 million in a new offering that were similar to the others he had been buying.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that if he were right about the trends this time, the payoff would be historic.  He would probably make close to a billion, if all the chips fell right, and as his investment strategy played out.