Page 182 of Rules of Association

CECI

SCTA.

Spindrift Cybersecurity and Technical Analysis.

If someone would have told me on my birthday that I would acquire an entire nonprofit organization, be opening a tech company, and still have other dreams tucked away for the future all by fall of the same year, I would have choked. But here I was sitting in my car one week before my first fundraising event with all of those things on my horizon.

After the insistence from both Paulo and my brother, I’d decided to just humor Ox and see what acquiring the shelter would look like. How I would do it and what benefits I’d be able to offer if it was under my (and my own board of directors’) control. Ox had done more than humor. He’d given me a detailed outline of the first three years. The first being the most formative where he’d take me under his wing and use Fernandez Inc. to help teach me what I needed in order to oversee something of this scale. The next two being more independent for me as a president, where I could do more vision based work and implement some of the ideas I had in mind for the organization’s growth.

The prospect was terrifying, but also the more I learned about it the more I fell in love with the possible reality of it.And the more I wanted it.So as of yesterday, the SWWS was mine. Not Ox’s or Fernandez Inc’s.Mine. It was all mine, and our first event was now my first test as president.

This could and should have been great news. But for one, I still couldn’t shake this feeling that what I was doing was too far off the carved path that my family had made. No matter how much Ox told me it didn’t matter, it felt silly almost. Maybe because I hadn’t told the rest of my family yet, or maybe because I hadn’t told my dad. But I wanted the fundraiser to go off without issue first, to know I could actually do the shelter some good as its president before taking it public to the rest of them.

And for two, I had another business to worry about.

I imagine Nin had something less precarious and more nurturing in mind when she’d given the advice to‘build Connor a bridge home’. But if I was building anything, it was going to be a plank that he was walking whether he wanted to or not.

I knew I hurt him. I knew I had used fear and fractured reasoning to justify ignoring the way he was pouring himself into me. I let myself float in this state of denial because it felt safer to have him somewhere I had already won him instead of diving into the unknown. Into a space where I could possibly lose him. It wasn’t fair to him, and I’d ended up losing him anyway so what was even the point of all that strain?

Yet even though I knew I hurt him and I knew he didn't deserve that, I still wanted to smack him.

He hadn’t even given me a chance that night. I said a stupid thing. Calling what we did a mistake was dumb and I didn’t think before I spoke, I just let my terrified emotions get the better of me. Buthe knew me, and he didn’t even give me a chance to breathe in the knowledge that heloved me—he didn’t even give me a chance to settle in that realization before he up and left me and told me not to bother him while he was gone.

Con was my ground. The foundation I had walked on for two years. Before I even knew what was happening, he’d become my beginning, middle, and end and he decided to snatch that away without even talking about it candidly with me. He decided to leave. And since he’d chosen to take my feet out from under me, I was dragging him back by his feet in turn. Or at least I was setting out to try.

Spindrift was the tech company he had always wanted to open. It didn't have any of his intellectual property, any of his programs, or much ofanythingat all, really. But it had his name. Both the one he’d always wanted to name a company of his own and his actual name plastered all over the company publicity. He also had his first client. One Seaside Waterways Women’s Shelter Planning Committee had hired him to be the technical analyst on contract for the woman’s festival. All it took after that was planting a few seeds around the Fergusons about their missing brother being the proud owner of a cyber security company. My hope being that the information would get back to him and bring him home.

I was an evil genius, because it all worked.

Connor was on his way home.Here already.

And I was terrified.

Not only by the niggling prospect that Connor could very well return home and not want the same things he’d wanted before. But also terrified of the lingering worry and doubt I had with my own circumstances and the fact that I’d been missing a best friend to lean on throughout those fears.

I had a headache. The kind that felt like your skull was cracked open right behind your eye. I’d only ever had them in passing, but lately, they had become an everyday thing. It was a buzzing, throbbing, pulsing sensation that only really let up when I slept… Which I wasn’t doing often. Actually, I’d had less sleep, appetite, or peace of mind lately than ever before. That added onto near exhaustion and raw knuckles from taking all these frustrations out on a heavy bag, and I was near sick.

But Connor was home. The fact had been solidified by Fergy’s invitation to this “Welcome back” dinner at my brother’s place.

I had been too nervous to go over to his house and see him before dinner without an invitation—or maybe just too scared to apologize to him just for him to possibly not forgive me. So instead of confronting and talking to him about this when we were alone, I would be seeing him for the first time here in front of our families with all of this unsaid, unexplained, unresolved energy between us. And even though I knew I was supposed to be sorry right now, for the life of me I couldn’t stop the beach from playing a taunting loop in my head.

His words.

His hug.

His goodbye.

And me walking away alone after all of it.

Despite my throbbing head, I still banged it against my steering wheel as I cowered nervously in my car. At the moment, the brave girl I always thought myself to be was nowhere to be found. I’d rather stay in my car and hide than have to face Con around our families and pretend that everything was okay. Pretending like we weren’t friends was only fun when there was no danger of it actually being true. Now the notion that we could have lost that friendship or even more, was enough to make me want to throw up.

A knock on my window caught me off guard and I pulled my head up from its resting place on the steering wheel to see the wrong Ferguson on the other side of it. I swallowed. I wasn’t even able to say anything witty or normal. I just rolled down my window and said, “Hey, Clay.”

“Hey, Pip-squeak,” he eased out cautiously. His Ferguson hazel eyes slid over me with wary apprehension before he raised an eyebrow. “You doing alright?”

Cutting the engine I forced myself to take a breath and then exited the car. Headache or not, it was time to face the music. “Fine, thanks.”

He just looked at me grimly, reaching a slow hand out to shut my car door behind me. “Dunno, Fernandez. You seem a little off.”

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