Finally Caleb noticed.
“What?”
Darius looked innocent.
“What?”
“You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The face you do when you’ve already made a decision and you’re waiting for me to walk into it.”
Renee laughed from the other end of the table.
“He gets that from you.”
Caleb looked between them.
“What did you do?”
Darius placed his fork down.
“I bought you something.”
Caleb became immediately suspicious.
“What kind of something?”
“A graduation gift.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“It has four wheels.”
Caleb stared.
“Dad.”
“Four doors.”
“Dad.”
“Very practical.”
Renee nearly choked on her water.
Caleb looked at his mother.
“You knew?”
She lifted both hands.
“I opposed the use of the word practical.”
Darius slid his phone across the table.
On the screen was a photograph sent by Sterling Exotic Motors.
Dark metallic gray.
Black wheels.
Red brake calipers.
A Lamborghini Urus.
Caleb stared at it for five full seconds.
Then pushed the phone back.
“No.”
Darius blinked.
“No?”
“No.”
“You haven’t even driven it.”
“That is not the problem.”
“What is the problem?”
“It’s ridiculous.”
Renee smiled into her glass.
Darius leaned back.
“You graduated with honors.”
“So?”
“You turned down the condo.”
“I didn’t need a condo.”
“You turned down the apartment in New York.”
“I had housing through the analyst program.”
“You refused the family office driver.”
“Because I know how to drive.”
“You used the same Honda for four years.”
“It works.”
“It has one hubcap from another model.”
“It still works.”
Darius looked at him for a long moment.
“That is exactly why I bought the Lamborghini.”
Caleb frowned.
“That makes no sense.”
“It does to me.”
Darius had grown up in Baltimore in a two-bedroom apartment with his mother and two sisters.
He understood the psychology of scarcity well enough to distrust extravagance.
He had also become wealthy enough that denying himself everything had eventually begun to look as artificial as buying everything.
Whitmore Capital Group had started twenty-seven years earlier with a small industrial-services acquisition financed through a combination of loans, private investors, and what Darius later described as a dangerous amount of optimism.
One company became three.
Three became twelve.
By the time Caleb entered high school, Whitmore Capital controlled businesses in infrastructure, transportation, manufacturing, logistics, renewable energy, and commercial services.
Its combined annual revenue exceeded six billion dollars.
Darius could buy almost anything that ordinary people associated with wealth.
What mattered to him was whether his children learned to believe they deserved things simply because he could buy them.
Caleb never had.
That was why Darius wanted to do something unreasonable for him exactly once.
“You could have asked me for this at sixteen,” Darius said.
“I would have said no.”
“I know.”
“At eighteen?”
“No.”
“Twenty?”
“Still no.”
Darius smiled.
“At twenty-two, after four years of refusing almost every shortcut I offered you, graduating with honors, working internships where half the people did not know who your father was, and accepting a job you got without calling me?”
Caleb shook his head.
“That does not make a Lamborghini sensible.”
“No.”
Darius nodded.
“It makes it a gift.”
Caleb looked at the photograph again.
“It’s too much.”
“Probably.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Caleb leaned back.
“What if I don’t accept it?”