White Space Season 2

just that: tell Blake exactly what he was thinking. There were few things he hated more than getting into an argument with his father, but he was certainly looking forward to this one.
    It was time.
    He deserved answers.
    And he was going to get them.
    What Blake had apparently ordered Warren to do all those years ago — coercing Sarah into keeping Jon’s child a secret — was beyond wrong. He had been robbed of what was rightfully his — the chance to decide what was best for his life. Sarah might not have been his Happily Ever After, but he deserved the right to see how their tale played out. And Jon deserved to know, and have a relationship with, his daughter.
    It was bullshit — bullshit he had been wanting to correct for the last several weeks, ever since Warren spit the truth in his face. Yet, no matter how many times Jon tried calling — on Blake’s personal line, through his private inbox, and even through Hillary, who still worked for Blake all these years later, even though she still messed up his schedule, and it was still a goddamned question of his sanity why he kept her on payroll.
    Jon smiled at his father’s almost blind loyalty.
    Hillary, like everyone else, was either evasive or in the dark about Blake’s whereabouts. Until Mrs. Rasmussen called to tell Jon his father was home, he’d been unable to get in touch. The further distance stretched between them, the angrier Jon grew. It was crap, his father avoiding him like he had been. And odd. Blake Conway was many, many things, depending on who was reporting the story, but Jon couldn’t imagine even his father’s fiercest critics calling the man a coward. For his father to be so completely MIA, and after the worst tragedy on island record, didn’t strike Jon as odd so much as oddly conspiratorial.
    He would have bet both balls that Warren was somehow behind his father’s distance. His brother was an asshole, and stupidly jealous for no reason at all. Always had been, ever since they were kids. He was 12 years older than Jon — just old enough to suffer from regular outbreaks of envy, as if Jon had personally ruined his life. Of course, Jon could understand a bit of it — Warren blamed him, and perhaps rightfully so — for their mother’s death during Jon’s birth. But it wasn’t as if Jon chose to be born. Just because he never had the chance to know his real mother didn’t mean he didn’t miss her. Not having a mother left a permanent void in Jon, but that didn’t mean he went around making other people’s lives miserable because of it.
    But it wasn’t just their mother who created a gulf between Warren and Jon. Some of it was also Blake.
    No matter how tightly Warren clutched the reigns of Conway Industries, claiming family fortune and legacy for himself, he remained almost vigilantly jealous of Jon, as though he held a spot in their father’s heart that Warren could never worm his way into, no matter how many science fairs or government contracts he won.
    Jon might have felt some sympathy for Warren’s situation — even if it mirrored Jon’s own so many times, also feeling second in his father’s eyes — if Warren hadn’t allowed envy to turn him into such a dick.
    Jealousy, so far as Jon saw it, was the weakest of all emotions. A competent, self-confident person wasn’t jealous, since jealousy was a symptom of neurotic insecurity. As the CEO for one of the largest companies in the world, Warren shouldn’t have been capable of such spite, yet Jon saw more insecurity and pettiness in Warren than he had in the past 10 years he’d spent in Hollywood — the vainest place on Earth.
    Warren liked to see himself as similar to Blake, and Jon as the black sheep who didn’t belong. But Jon knew that was absurd. He knew both the public and private versions of his father well. Neither were like Warren, or Jon.
    Blake Conway wasn’t just a successful father with a long shadow, though. He was an icon, currently #7 on the Forbes list of billionaires, up from #98 just three years before. His trajectory was unparalleled, and many people from Wall Street to Silicon Valley figured he’d be in the Top 5 by decade’s end, if not sooner. Blake Conway was so admired a figure, he wasn’t just quoted in business circles, his quotes also lit the walls of LiveLyfe accounts all over the world. He was one of the few billionaires who was a household name, even among people who had never read a business article in their lives. His vision