Chapter 3: Father Knows Best
The door clicked shut behind Dee, sealing Matt in with the sudden, heavy quiet. The scent of her fig and vetiver lingered like a taunt. Simon didn’t move from his place at the head of the table. He just stared at the door, as if he could still see the shape of his daughter through the frosted glass.
Then he turned. The paternal exasperation was gone, wiped clean. What remained was colder, flatter.
“So,” Simon said. He walked to the sideboard, poured two fingers of amber whiskey into a tumbler that hadn’t been clean that morning. He didn’t offer one to Matt. “You’re a contract lawyer now.”
Matt kept his posture relaxed, leaning back in the chair. “Just paying attention. You taught me that.”
“Did I?” Simon took a slow sip, his eyes sharp over the rim of the glass. “I taught you a lot of things. How to read a crowd. How to pick a script that won’t sink your career. How to smile at a party when you want to punch the director.” He set the glass down with a definitive clink. “I don’t recall giving a seminar on morality clause specifics. Especially not on sub-clause revisions that require a fucking lexicographer to parse.”
“It seemed obvious.” Matt shrugged, the lie feeling thin as silk. “Vague language is bad for me. You’ve said that a hundred times.”
“I have.” Simon finally moved, circling the table like a shark gauging a swimmer. He stopped behind Matt’s chair, forcing him to twist to see him. A power move. Old school. “But you’ve never given a single, solitary shit about the legalese before. You trusted me to handle it. For ten years, that’s been our deal. I handle the snakes. You handle the screen.”
The air grew thicker, tasted of stale coffee and bourbon fumes. “I’m still trusting you, Simon.”
“Are you?” Simon’s hand came down on Matt’s shoulder, heavy, more a shackle than a gesture of camaraderie. “It didn’t feel like trust in here today. It felt like a correction. A pretty specific, well-informed correction.” He leaned down, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper near Matt’s ear, mirroring the very intimacy he must have suspected. “What was that, Matthew?”
A cold trickle of adrenaline traced Matt’s spine. He stayed very still. “It was a contract negotiation.”
The hand on his shoulder tightened, then released as Simon stalked back to face him, planting both fists on the table. The stacked scripts trembled. “Look at me. And don’t you ever, ever lie to my face.”
The quiet in the room was absolute now, a vacuum. Matt looked up. He saw the man who had pulled him from indie obscurity, who had fought like a wild dog for his roles, who had shown up at his dad’s funeral when no one else did. He also saw the fear in Simon’s eyes. Not fear of a lost client. Fear of a breached wall.
“She’s my daughter,” Simon said, each word measured, carved from stone.
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because I need you to remember what that means. I need you to remember the conversation we had when you signed with me. You were thirty. She was twenty. A kid. I sat you down in this same fucking chair and I told you how this works.” Simon’s jaw was a hard line. “I said, ‘This business will eat pretty, young things for breakfast. It will use them and spit them out. My daughter is not part of this business. She is off-limits. Not a distraction. Not a conquest. Not a footnote in your story.’ Do you remember what you said?”
Matt remembered. The memory was a physical ache. He’d been so eager, so grateful. The boundary had seemed theoretical, a formality. “I said she’d be like a sister.”
A harsh, humorless bark of laughter escaped Simon. “Right. A sister.” He pushed off the table, his energy suddenly spent, replaced by a weary, volcanic rage. “I’ve seen it before. A dozen times. Talent and temptation. It’s a fucking cliché that burns down careers and families. I will not let that cliché walk into my life wearing my daughter’s face.”
“Simon, nothing has happened.”
“But you want it to.” Simon’s voice was chillingly calm now. He’d seen the truth, pulled it into the light. “I’ve got eyes. I saw how you looked at her when she walked in. I saw that little… performance with the missing page. You think I was born yesterday? You think I don’t know the sound of my own daughter whispering?”
The accusation hung there, undeniable. Matt said nothing. His silence was confession enough.
Simon nodded slowly, as if confirming a dire diagnosis. “Okay. Okay, Matt. Here’s the new deal. You finish this contract. You do the ‘Whisper Creek’ sequel. You keep it professional and you keep it the hell away from her. Or I will choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Between you and her!” Simon roared, the sound raw in the small room. He clenched his fists, mastering himself again with visible effort. “And it won’t be a choice. It will be her. It will always be her. I will drop you as a client so fast your head will spin. I will make sure every door in this town that I’ve opened for you feels the draft when I slam it shut. I will burn my own representation to the ground to keep her from becoming another casualty of your world. Do you understand me?”
The threat was not professional. It was primal. It was the sound of a man tearing up the foundational contract of their decade together.
Matt stood up. The chair legs screeched against the floor. He felt unmoored, cut loose from the certainty of the past ten years. The loyalty he’d worn like a second skin now felt like a leash he hadn’t known was there.
“I understand,” Matt said, his voice quiet. He understood everything now. The boundary wasn’t about protection. It was about possession. Simon possessed his career. He possessed his daughter. And he would not allow them to mix.
“Good.” Simon turned his back, looking out the grimy window at the hazy LA skyline. The dismissal was absolute. “We’re done here. Send the revised clause notes to legal. And Matt?”
Matt paused at the door, his hand on the cool brass knob.
“Think with the head on your shoulders, not the one in your pants. For both your sakes.”
Matt walked out, leaving the door open behind him. The empty bullpen outside Simon’s office was silent, a neon-lit vacuum. The ghost of her perfume was finally gone, replaced by the sterile smell of air conditioning and dust.
He walked past her empty desk, neat and imposing. He didn’t look at the framed photos on Simon’s walls—the smiling, sharp-eyed girl forever out of reach. He saw instead the woman she was now, the fierce intelligence in her eyes as she handed him the weapon to subtly undermine her father.
Simon had drawn a line in the sand.
As Matt stepped into the elevator, the fluorescent light buzzing overhead, a terrible, clarifying thought settled in his chest. The battle lines weren’t just drawn.
He had already crossed them.