“I apologize. I promise, I’ll explain everything to you. I’ll stay here as long as you like and answer every question you have. It’s not in my best interest to withhold information from you,” Prescott said smoothly. “But first, I want to ask you a few questions.”
“Shoot,” Ryan said impatiently, struggling to keep his emotions in check.
“Have you accepted any offers for employment yet?”
“No, not yet. I’ve got some good offers on the table,” he said, his mind sticking on the one he’d gotten one night earlier from Annamaria. “But I haven’t formalized anything yet.”
“How are you going to decide?” Prescott asked, his eyes narrowing as he leaned into the table toward Ryan. “What are you looking for?”
“I’m looking for something impactful,” he said without hesitation. “I realize I’m only eighteen, and maybe my first job won’t give me the opportunity to change the world, but I have to see it as at least a step in that direction.”
Prescott nodded. That was essentially where he’d been when he was finishing college. Every decision he’d made was toward one ambitious goal. But his goal had been better defined. It wasn’t clear that Ryan was working toward something specific. Changing tacks, he continued, “What do you care about? What are you passionate about?”
Again Ryan answered without pause. “I think people with cancer naturally care about cancer research. People with Parkinson’s disease care about that. So it should come as no surprise that on a personal level I care about the plight of orphans.
“And while I think Avillage has done some good things to address the issue of orphan neglect, I think you’ve swung the pendulum too far the other way — toward exploitation.”
Prescott nodded indifferently, as if he were collecting random survey data. “What did you do your senior project on at Harvard?”
“I did it on Avillage,” Ryan said.
“I did mine on Avillage at Princeton,” Prescott said, smiling. “Almost forty years ago.”
Ryan’s expression lightened. “You might not be smiling if you read mine.”
“I’d love to hear your perspective some time,” he said, unoffended. “I’ll be the first to admit I’ve made some mistakes along the way. But I’m also very confident I’ve done much more good than harm — on a national scale.”
“What about on an individual scale?” Ryan asked.
Prescott gazed over the long table and out the window. “That’s difficult, if not impossible, to measure. And if I’m being completely honest, I don’t spend too much time thinking about that. But we both know that people who are miserable are generally unproductive, and that’s not in anyone’s best interest.
“I can tell you that what most parents — good ones anyway — try to do is identify their children’s strengths and nurture those. We have the opportunity to go a step further. We identify strengths and then choose the parents who can best nurture that child’s specific gifts.”
“Meddling along the way of course,” Ryan chimed in.
“As little as possible actually,” Prescott said. “You’d be surprised how much we leave to the adoptive parents. We just try to take some of the subjectivity out of the parenting process.”
“That’s not the perspective of the Avillage orphans I’ve talked to.”
“That may be a function of your sample size,” Prescott said. “And I think you’d find that most kids, adopted or not, think their parents meddle too much in their lives.”
“Most kids don’t end up in federal prison over their resentment for their parents, or die on a basketball court because they weren’t told of their potentially fatal heart condition, or wake up scared and alone in a hospital after elective surgeries their parents signed them up for without their knowledge.”
“Those are extreme examples — all tied to one person in the company. And as soon as I found out what he’d been up to, I fired him on the spot.
“We’ve been cooperating fully with the authorities in their investigation from day one. Everything so far is pointing to Aaron Bradford’s having acted alone.
“J’Quarius Jones was a tragedy," he said, shaking his head dolefully. "There’s nothing I can do to make that any better, except to try to prevent it from ever happening again. After he died, I changed our policy to make medical records immediately available to the adoptive parents and the entire board — not just the chairman.
“As for Dillon Higley, he made his choices, and he’ll have to live with the consequences. But he’s far too talented to spend the rest of his life in prison. The federal government needs people like him on their side. My bet is he’ll spend some quality time with his dad, but as soon as he gets tired of being in prison, he’ll cut some sort of deal.
“Parenthetically, it’ll be interesting to see how the government compensates the shareholders if they let him out early to work for them. You know he’s still listed on the exchange.”
Ryan couldn’t help but be impressed at how well he knew each of his listings, but these were certainly some of the higher-profile orphans.
“And as for poor Annamaria Olivera,” Prescott continued, “well, she’s an international star now. I’d say it appears she’s come through her childhood trauma quite well.”
“So it would seem from the outside," Ryan said. "Did you know that last night she asked me to join her in running an orphanage in her hometown in Panama?"
For the first time, Prescott’s smile faded. He could see that Ryan was serious. “Well, that would be a shame if you did something like that.”
“Giving hundreds of orphans a home? Teaching them the skills they need to escape a life of poverty? That would be a shame?”
“It’s a low-risk proposition with modest reward at best,” Prescott said, his voice rising just slightly. “Granted it would take dedication and compassion. Admirable. But millions of people can offer that. You could personally hire the best headmaster on the planet for a hundred thousand a year and have him report to you. Ryan, you’re special! When are you going to accept the responsibility that comes with that?
“I’m not talking about donating a few thousand dollars to the red cross or tithing to your church or rescuing a neighbor’s cat from a tree! History books are filled with the stories of men like you and me.
“Your advancing a few dozen kids from poverty to the middle class in Panama wouldn’t just be a shame. It would be a waste!”
Prescott kept his gaze locked on Ryan’s. “And you know it.”
For thirty seconds they sat in silence, staring straight at each other from across the table.
Ryan no longer felt at a disadvantage in the conversation. Prescott clearly wanted something from him, and floating out the idea of escaping to Panama seemed to have rattled him. A pressure had arisen in Prescott’s speech. An urgency.
“Why didn’t you let me defend my title in the spelling bee?” Ryan asked, breaking the silence and dialing back the tension that had been building between them. He did legitimately want to know the answer, but they both knew it wasn’t the question he really wanted to ask.
“You’d already proven you could beat kids four and five years older than you,” Prescott said, relaxing back in his chair a little, reminding himself that if Ryan made this too easy, he was probably the wrong person. “What good would it have done to send you back there one year older? It’d be like arm wrestling the strongest girl in your class. Lose and your reputation is shot. Win and you’ve gained nothing.”
“I wouldn’t have lost,” Ryan said confidently.
“I know,” Prescott countered, glowing with a fatherly pride. “And the fact that you know it too was precisely why you didn’t need to go back.”