The lawyer said "unfortunately" four times in the first six minutes, and Kai Wale, who had nothing better to do, was counting.
He sat in one of those chairs that looked expensive without committing to actually being comfortable - leather too stiff, armrests too square, the whole office arranged to remind you that the man behind the desk charged by the hour and had been doing so for a long time. Framed degrees on the wall. A globe on a shelf that probably hadn't been touched since the Clinton administration. A box of tissues on the corner of the desk that Kai found quietly threatening, like a piece of furniture that already knew how this was going to go.
He had taken the bus here. He'd pictured leaving in a private limousine.
"Your father's estate," said Mr. Aldren, adjusting his glasses for the third time in as many minutes, "was, unfortunately, structured in a manner that - "
"Unfortunately..." Kai sighed.
Aldren stopped. "I beg your pardon?"
"That's five. You've said it five times."
A silence settled over the room - the specific kind of silence that forms when a man who charges four hundred dollars an hour doesn't know what to do with his hands. Aldren set his glasses down entirely, as if removing them might help him handle this better. "Mr. Wale. Your father, Marcus Vale - "
"Wale," Kai said. "His name was Marcus Wale. Mine is Kai Wale."
"Yes. Of course." A cleared throat. "Your father's estate - the properties, the investment portfolio, the Wale Group holdings, the primary residence - has been allocated, in full, to your sister. Elena Wale."
Kai looked at him and said nothing, because sometimes silence is the only proportionate response to information that the brain needs a moment to actually process.
He was twenty-four years old. He had thirty-eight dollars in his bank account, not counting the overdraft fee that had landed two days ago and brought the real number closer to eighteen. He had come here on a Thursday morning, on a bus, because his father had just died and he had assumed - reasonably, he felt, with the particular optimism of a man who has never had reason to assume otherwise - that a person worth three hundred and forty million dollars might have set something aside for his only son.
"There is," Aldren said carefully, "an envelope."
He slid it across the desk like a man offering something he wished he didn't have to offer. Plain white. Kai's name on the front in handwriting he hadn't seen in three years - his father's script, cramped and a bit messy, the letters of someone who had always chosen words like they cost something.
Kai opened it.
Inside: Not a signed contract making Kai a few hundred thousand dollars richer. Not a check.
A single hundred-dollar bill, flat and crisp like it had been ironed. And behind it, a piece of notepaper with three words.
He read it twice, just to make sure.
Prove me wrong.
The office was very quiet. Somewhere outside, a car horn sounded once. Kai sat with those three words for a while, thinking about the last real conversation he'd had with his father - fourteen months ago, twenty minutes on the phone, mostly just space between sentences, ending with Marcus saying he had a meeting and Kai saying sure, neither of them saying a single thing that mattered. He thought about Elena at the funeral two days ago, standing in a coat that probably cost more than his rent, her face arranged into something composed and unreachable, not looking at him once for the entire service. He thought about his apartment with the broken radiator, the energy drink in the fridge, and the eighteen dollars.
Then he put the hundred-dollar bill and the note in his jacket pocket, stood up, and shook the lawyer's hand.
"Thank you," he said. "For your time."
Aldren blinked - he had clearly prepared himself for something louder. "Of course. I'm - "
"Unfortunate" Kai said, and walked out.
* * *
He stood on the pavement outside for a while, doing nothing in particular, letting the city move around him the way cities do when they're indifferent to your problems - taxis, pedestrians, a delivery cyclist threading between buses. Normal Thursday morning.
He took the hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and looked at it.
His father had built a three-hundred-and-forty-million-dollar empire through thirty years of calculated risk, had sat across from people trying to ruin him and never once flinched, had been the kind of man who read other people the way most people read menus - fast, accurate, never forgetting a single item. And his last message to his only son was three words and a bill that wouldn't cover two nights at a mid-range hotel.
The anger was there. He could feel it sitting in his chest like something swallowed too fast, warm and persistent. But underneath it stranger, was something that felt almost like a response forming. A challenge accepted, maybe. Or the very first draft of one.
Three blocks east, he knew, there was a casino - not one of the flashy ones that tourists photographed from the street, just a plain mid-tier building with a sign promising air conditioning and complimentary drinks if you were playing.
Kai put the money back in his pocket and started walking.
Fine, old man...
I'll prove you wrong.