Chapter 24: Past & Present
Artemis Long was ready.
He’d been preparing for days, and the fortune teller woman had said that today would be his watershed moment, the day that would change his life. He adjusted his tie and looked at himself in the mirror.
He had been a good-looking young man once upon a time, but those days had long past leaving behind only a greedy fool.
Greedy fool, that’s what Ling had called him the day she’d left. So many years had passed since then. What would she have called him now? Probably ’greed old fool’.
She’d refused to change her surname to match his even when they had moved abroad to the West. He couldn’t remember the number of times people had asked him if she really was his wife not some girlfriend - how much humiliation that had brought him. Their eventual divorce had been inevitable, he just had failed to see it.
Artemis chuckled to himself.
He rarely smiled, and never laughed these days, not since Ling had left him and not since he’d had to leave Misha in that boarding school and return to this godforsaken place to carve a future out for the both of them.
Then he’d convinced Misha to join him. Was that part of carving out a future for them?
He shook his head.
He deserved to be called a ’greedy old fool’.
"Colin," he called out in his usual voice, gone was the self-pitying aging man, replaced by the ruthless visionary.