“Do you know anything about me or am I just pissing away time here?” Annamaria hissed with the tone of a queen addressing one of her subjects, unable to get over the fact that she was relying on what appeared to be a middle school nerd.
“Yes I know something, and yes, you’re wasting your time here,” Dillon sneered, shaking his head in disgust.
“Look,” Annamaria shot back, her accent picking up. “If you think I need you, you are sorely mistaken, my little friend. All I need is a doctor to confirm what happened to me, and I’ll be on the front page of every paper in the country tomorrow.”
“What happened to you?” Dillon asked, with no idea what she was talking about.
She folded her waistband down, as Dillon stared at the small scars, equally embarrassed by their location and confused about their significance.
“Oh my God! You didn’t even know about it?” Annamaria sighed, rolling her eyes and turning for the door.
“I think Annamaria had a tubal ligation,” Ryan muttered quietly to Dillon, getting nothing but a blank look in return. “Tubes tied.”
“Whoa!” Dillon gasped, finally clued in. “Wait! Don’t go. We need to talk.”
“Annamaria, I think you should stay,” Ryan said softly. “You came all the way from New York for this.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force herself into a rational decision, when the only thing she wanted to do was run out of the room and never look back.
“Two things I want you to think about,” Ryan said. “And I’m not trying to cause you any more pain. One: there were other poor, orphaned teenage girls surreptitiously sterilized after the Panama disaster. I read a New York Times piece on it a couple of years ago. It’s happened in other developing countries after devastating natural disasters too. It was a terrible thing that happened to you, but it didn’t happen only to you. It might be harder than you think to pin that on Avillage, and I’m sure if they’re at the bottom of this, they’d be well aware of that.
“Two: Dillon does know what he’s doing. Yes, he’s a pain in the ass to work with, but you can’t question his commitment. He’s been as angry as you are right now for five straight years.”
Dillon didn’t exactly take it as a compliment, but he also couldn’t protest what was a pretty accurate characterization.
Annamaria’s face relaxed slightly, as she let out a long sigh and slowly sat down on the corner of Dillon’s bed.
“Here’s what I’ve got,” Dillon said, snuggling up to his computer. “Your ticker symbol is BUTY, which I’m sure you already knew, and your chairman is Aaron Bradford. He’s also the chairman of one of the Yankees’ top pitching prospects (also from Panama,) who he discovered on the same trip he met you. The only other kid of note he’s been chairman for was J’Quarius Jones, who, unfortunately, is dead.
“Prior to your going public, a partial ownership gift of 1.5% was transferred to a Carlos Villanueva…”
“I knew it!” Annamaria shouted, slamming her fist into the mattress.
“What? Who’s Carlos Villanueva?” Ryan asked.
“The headmaster at my orphanage,” she said, her lower lip quivering. “He sold me like a slave.”
“And he’s been making a lot of money off of you,” Dillon pointed out, trying to fan the flames.
“Maybe,” Ryan said. “You were adopted after Avillage started offering a 1.5% ownership stake to anyone who referred an orphan that went on to be successfully adopted. What he got would’ve been standard.”
“Still, he referred you, didn’t he?” Dillon said, scowling at Ryan. “So when was your… uh… procedure done?”
“Fourteen days before I was adopted,” she said, biting down on the inside of her lower lip.
“So 12 days before her IPO,” Ryan added.
Dillon was typing and clicking and scrolling maniacally. “Hmm,” he said. “It doesn’t look like there’s any paper trail of any meeting in Panama at all around that time. Bradford’s travel plans were well documented, but he either doesn’t use computers or he covers his tracks so well that he leaves absolutely no record of what he’s been up to.”
“Well, he definitely wasn’t in Panama at the time of your surgery because that was the day J’Quarius died,” Ryan said, putting the dates together in his head.
“Who’s J’Quarius again?” Annamaria asked.
“He was another orphan chaired by Bradford,” Ryan said. “A lot of people thought he had the potential to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but he died just before he turned eighteen of a heart condition, which either was or should have been diagnosed a week beforehand, when he’d collapsed on the court during a game.
“After he died, Bradford sued the University of Chicago Children’s Hospital, where he’d initially been treated, for failing to disclose the risks of the heart condition that had caused his death. The hospital ended up settling out of court.”
“The amount was never disclosed!” Dillon chimed in.
“Dillon thinks it was all a PR stunt on Bradford’s part, and he might be right, but the day the court settlement was announced, Bradford did donate a million bucks in J’Quarius Jones’s name to a foundation that identifies and treats kids with the same kind of heart condition he had.”
“Get your head out of your ass!” Dillon blurted out. “That was his own money! He talked to the doctors the day J’Quarius passed out the first time. He got the whole story. And then he sat there in the stands with those rich Russian team owners and just watched him die.
“Bradford’s not an idiot. You know he had that kid’s life insured for more than a million dollars.” Then he softened his tone as he turned to Annamaria. “J’Quarius’s parents never forgave him. They actually tried to block the piece of shit from being allowed to use J’Quarius’s name for the foundation. They were very vocal.”
“So how did Bradford get out of that?” Annamaria asked.
“Oh, he was very apologetic publicly. Said he couldn’t even imagine what the adoptive parents were going through,” Dillon said disgustedly. “Then he kept bringing up that the one thing he could take solace in was that at least he’d been instrumental in picking them as the perfect parents for J’Quarius. The media bought it hook, line and sinker. He’s a scumbag. Probably the worst guy in the whole company.”
“But he’s not your chairman?” Dillon was kind of growing on her.
“Nope. Bradford’s second in command at Avillage. My chairman’s some mid-level yes-man who’s too stupid to be sinister. If he never showed up for work again, it’d probably take weeks for someone to notice.”
“What about you?” she asked Ryan.
“Him?” Dillon jumped in. “No, no. Ryan’s chairman is the head honcho. None other than James Prescott himself — the founder and CEO of Avillage. Prescott gets shares in all of us, but he’s only the chairman for one,” he said pointing a sideways thumb at Ryan. “And he’s been buying every time the golden boy’s price dips.”
“Really? What’s he like?” she asked Ryan hesitantly.
"I don’t know. He’s not that bad,” Ryan shrugged. “He was a little tough on certain things. Probably a little too intent on making sure I learned that life isn’t fair, but nothing compared to what happened to you guys.
“I mean, he didn’t let me participate in certain activities or go on certain field trips growing up. Things like that. And the only college he let me to apply to was Harvard. But my life’s pretty good.
“He’s obviously not as benevolent as he claims to be, but he did set me up with good parents, I am getting a Harvard degree, and I probably am better off now than I would’ve been if Avillage hadn’t adopt me out of that orphanage. It’s just…”