The Hero + Vegas = No Regrets

I glance at the door as my assistant comes into my office. Her sudden appearance means I’m running late on my video call. It’s her job to keep me on time, and if I don’t finish a call, she’ll come in and make sure it finishes. It took me a while to find an assistant who’s prepared to interrupt me and tell me to finish up my meeting. But I’ve grown very fond of Veronica.

“Mr. Huntington, your two o’clock is waiting.”

“I’m going to have to leave things here, Patrick,” I say. “But I think we’ve got a clear way forward. Let’s talk same time next week.” I nod at Veronica—a reminder to her to put it in the calendar.

I end the call and stand. I need to move around.

“Shall I show in your next meeting?” Veronica asks. There’s something in the tone of her voice I can’t quite place.

“Yes. Who is it?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer my question, which isn’t like her.

Before I have the chance to call after her, Avril bursts through the door. “Brother dearest.”

“Avril, you’re going to have to go. I have a meeting.”

“I’m your two o’clock,” she says, handing me an iPad. “You left my business plan at Tavern on the Green, so I’m here to deliver it in person.”

Shit. In all the drama of Thanksgiving, I’d forgotten about Avril’s plan. I’d kinda hoped coming off academic probation would inspire her to finish her degree after all.

“Okay, well, I’ve got it now. I’ll let you know when I’ve had a chance to look at it.”

She shakes her head, a mischievous grin unfurling on her face. “I’m booked in for an hour. You’re not getting rid of me until I have my money’s worth.” She holds out her hand to the small conference table in my office. “Shall we?”

I know Avril well enough to realize I’ll waste more time trying to tell her to leave than just going with it. I sigh and take a seat.

She smiles at me, knowing she’s already won her first victory.

“So,” she says, “I’m here to talk to you about Hotel on Ninth Street.”

She was meant to formulate a plan for her future, not talk about my business issues. “Hotel on Ninth Street? You mean… my white elephant of a building on the corner of Forty-Sixth and Ninth?”

“I could draw you a Venn diagram, but you’ll get the picture soon enough.”

She opens a presentation on the iPad. The front page is a fancy logo for the aptly named hotel. She swipes through to the next slide.

In the moments before she starts talking, I really take her in. She’s wearing black pants and a crisp black shirt. I’ve never seen my sister in business casual before. Seeing her dressed like this, it hits me that she’s an adult—not a kid who needs protecting. At least, not the same ways she did when we were both younger.

“I’m going to ask you to think about this project as if it’s brand new,” she says. “Everything that’s gone before are sunk costs. We don’t want them clouding our judgement. I’ve done a cost analysis for a new apartment building and for restoring the current building and turning it into a hotel. I’ve also gone through the financials your previous business partner drew up. I hate to tell you this, Worth, but they’re a pile of bullshit. They had a completely illogical average cost of capital, which threw all the other numbers out of whack.”

“I use the same WAC for all my investments.”

“You might, but the guy who took your money didn’t—and whoever you had look over the numbers didn’t catch it.”

I pull back my shoulders, feeling slightly uneasy. Did Avril completely misread the financials, or has she really discovered something? And when did she start doing financial analysis? Did she rope Poppy into this?

Did my team really miss something?

“How did you even get the historical numbers?”

“You know Veronica wears the same perfume as Mom?”

That was the last thing I expected Avril to say. “What? Ver— How do you even remember what perfume Mom wore?” Avril was only four when Dad died. Mom never wore perfume again.

“I remember. I stole the bottle out of her bathroom. Poppy and I used to wear it.”

“Huh,” I say. “So Veronica gave you confidential financial information about my business?”

“If you fire her, I’ll kill you,” Avril says. “She’s amazing. And besides, I told her my plan and she’s invested. Let’s get to the end and you can tell me you don’t love her a little bit more for believing in it.”

I roll my eyes. She’s so dramatic.

“Okay, so whatever, you have an issue with your finance people. You can deal with that on your watch. This is my hour.” She swipes to a different screen. She’s had her nails done short, in a neutral color. The last time I saw her, her nails were blue and looked like ten deadly weapons. Avril really means business. “So it turns out, restoring the current building and turning it back into a hotel isn’t as profitable as your proposed development over a ten-year period. But over a twenty-five-year period, it’s more profitable.”

I start to speak but she cuts me off. “I know that means you have more inherent risk, but let’s talk about reward.”

She flips over the iPad screen, like I’m a grandpa who couldn’t quite manage it myself. “This is the Huntington family legacy.” The screen fills with a bronze wash over the building, and in gold, “Hotel on Ninth Street” fills the page. Then underneath, in smaller letters along the bottom of the page, reads “A Huntington Family Hotel.”

I glance across at her, trying to read her expression. The next three slides are renderings of a lush, elegant hotel lobby. Then on the next page, Poppy’s picture comes up, along with her biography. “Director of Huntington Investments, Poppy acts as chairman of Hotel on Ninth Street.”

“I think you’re too old to play make-believe, Avril. Poppy has a perfectly good job at Goldman Sachs. There’s no way she’s going to come work for her brother. And by the way, she doesn’t have enough experience.”

“Well, A, she’s up for working for you. I already asked her. And B, your finance director needs to be fired. We already established that.”

I make a mental note to go through the Ninth Street development financials to see if Bryan missed anything. If he did, I need to know whether there might be a reasonable explanation for the lapse. “You think Poppy is going to give up her job at Goldman? She’s killing it there. Even if she’s having a bit of a rough patch, she’ll be partner in ten years.”

Avril looks at me like I’m the stupidest man ever to have lived. “Maybe being a partner at Goldman isn’t what she wants. Ever thought about that?”

“Oh right,” I say. “Loads of people turn down that opportunity.”

“No, you’re right. If you’ve put in loads of time and effort, sacrificed family and friends, relationships, vacations and holidays for two decades, you’re probably not going to turn it down when it’s offered. But maybe she doesn’t want to pay the price of partnership.”

I make another mental note to talk to Poppy about how things are going at work. She’d said something at Thanksgiving, but I just thought it was normal complaining about work.

Avril swipes the screen again and reads aloud the bio under her headshot. “Avril is the creative director of the hotel. She’s gradually learning all aspects of hotel management with a view to becoming the manager.”

“You’re at Columbia for economics,” I say, incredulous. “You want to become a hotel manager?”

She sighs. “You’ve always worked so hard for us, Worth. Poppy and I see it, and we’re so grateful. You’ve done it our entire lives. And it’s not just about becoming the businessman you are today—you’ve worked hard at trying to get us to succeed, too. You’ve worked hard at keeping our family together. But it’s time we shared the burden. This hotel would be a central point where we can all come together. You as owner, Poppy as chairman and finance director. Me as manager—one day.” Her eyes go glassy as she speaks. “It means we’ll all be in each other’s lives forever.”

I’m stunned into silence. I’m completely and utterly floored. I always thought Avril thought of me as an interfering, overbearing father figure. I assumed she’d want space, not the exact opposite.

“I want this hotel to be our family legacy. Not death. Not grief. Not survival.”

How can I say no to that?

“I know I could stay at Columbia and finish out my degree, but honestly, I have almost two years to go. And in two years, I could have learned so much. I thought I could go to Boston to work in your hotel there. Or I could ask Bennett or Jules if I could work at their place while I help oversee renovations on Ninth Street.”

“I’ll need to think this through,” I say. “And I need to talk to Poppy.”

She nods enthusiastically, like she’s willing a yes out of me.

“You know Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. And Bill Gates,” she says. “And Ben Affleck, although⁠—”

“Quit while you’re ahead. And anyway, dropping out of college doesn’t mean you’re going to become successful. They’re the exceptions, not the rule.”

“We’re exceptions. Poppy, you, and me. You’ve achieved so much, Worth. But most of all, you protected Poppy and me. I know we don’t talk about it a lot. But we would be in very different places in our lives if it hadn’t been for you.”

I take in a steadying breath. She’s right—we don’t talk about how bad it got with Mom after Dad’s death. How I learned to make dinner by watching the Cooking Channel, how I faked Mom’s signature on permission slips, the excuses I’d make up for her not attending soccer matches and ballet recitals. “Maybe,” I say.

“I remember, Worth,” she says. “How you’d make me my lunch. How you’d come to my gymnastics class and pretend Mom was in the parking lot making a call when the other moms asked you where she was.”

I swallow. “It was a long time ago and we’re all in different places now.”

“Because of you,” she whispers.

“So, what’s this hotel thing? You’re trying to repay me or something? You don’t owe me anything.”

“That’s the best part of you. You did everything to keep our family together and you never talk about it, never throw it in our faces. You’ve never asked us for anything. You just keep giving more. I would never try to repay you, because I know that’s the last thing you want. What I can do is my part to keep us together, just like you’ve done for so many years. I think this hotel would be the embodiment of that. A central place of connection for the three of us.”

“Let me guess: you’re thinking you could be my eyes and ears on the ground at Ninth Street during refurbishment, while simultaneously learning about the hotel business?”

She’s no poker player. Her smile says she’d agree to anything right now. Seeing her happy like this shifts something in me. Yes, I want her to get her degree, but I never went to college until business school. It didn’t do me any harm, even if I was one of three people in the history of the school who didn’t have an undergrad degree before doing the MBA.

“Absolutely,” she says. “I’d really like to be involved with the renovations. And the design process. I know I’m no architect or designer, but I can see space. And I have a really cool vision for the look and feel of the place.”

“Right, but you wouldn’t get final say on that.”

“I just want to be part of the discussion. If it’s our family legacy, I want to feel like I’ve contributed.”

I’ve worked so hard for so long, I’m not sure how I feel about my sisters working alongside me. Everyone I work with is dependent on me for a paycheck. It means what they tell me gets filtered into acceptable form. Working with family would be different. It could be a good thing. It could be a great thing. But I need to think carefully before I make a decision. This hotel could bring us together, but it also could tear us apart.

“I understand,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I can ask. I already have an appointment in your calendar in two weeks. You can give me your decision then. In the meantime, we’re going to lunch. Let’s find somewhere to eat.”