Page 70 of Most Eligible Billionaire

“Uh.” I pull into myself more tightly, my limbs finding the old familiar grooves with each other. I feel like I’m falling, falling, back into that well.

“Are you claustrophobic?”

I pull my legs tighter. I should answer, but I want him to talk, not me.

“You seemed okay in the many elevators we’ve been traveling,” he says.

“It’s because this shaft feels like a well. The unfinished sides, the light above.”

“Oh.” A beat, then, “Do you have…history with a well?”

“I fell in one,” I say. “When I was younger. They didn’t find me for a pretty long time, and I was just terrified out of my mind.”

“How long?”

I’m about to say three days, but that’s the kind of thing that gets reported in the news. “Long enough,” I say. “I felt like I’d fallen off the face of the earth. But most of all, it was terrifying. I was scared of the dark to start with. And you don’t know how dark the bottom of a well is—you have no idea. I thought I’d never get out. People couldn’t find me. And there are slugs, and it’s just…” I shudder. “It was a long time in there.”

He slides his arm around my shoulders. “This isn’t a well.”

“I know,” I say. “But I kind of don’t know.”

He pulls me close. I find myself leaning into him.

“It would be scary,” he says. “Alone. Not sure if you’d be found.”

“Yeah,” I say.Not sure if you’d be found by the right people, anyway.

He pulls his phone out and whips off a quick text, then clicks off. A few moments later, the shaft is flooded with light from the bottom.

“Oh,” I say.

“Is that better? Less well-like?”

“Thanks. It is better.”

“You got out of that well, Vicky.”

“I got out. And grew up to be a dog whisperer slash captain of industry,” I add. He says nothing. It’s a stupid joke. “I’m sorry. I’m just messed up right now.”

Bangs and drills sound from below.

“It’s hard to be powerless like that.”

“It’s more about the fear,” I say. “Did you ever have that fear of footsteps in the dark? And then you get to the warmth and light of safety and it’s such a relief. But in the well, it was like the footsteps never stopped. Hour after hour, the terror kept grinding on. It took everything out of me. Fear is exhausting. Little-known fact.”

“How long were you in it?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“I'm sorry that happened to you,” he says.

“Something. Else.”

He sighs. “You know that model we fixed together? With the trees? And I wouldn’t tell you why it was important to fix it?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, well, now I’m telling you. There’s this guy, Renaldo, he’s the one who made it. He eighty-five, one of the oldest guys in all of Locke. He helped my grandfather and father build the company, and he definitely has enough money to retire, but building is his life. Those models take him forever to make, but Brett and I feel like it keeps him alive. And if he saw the thing destroyed…he’d be crushed.”

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