“You know what, Andrew? I’ve been too generous with you. Three years I let you walk around here pretending you belonged.” He looked at his guests, making sure they were watching. They were. “Three years I watched you shuffle around my property like you owned the place. Touching my flowers, walking on my paths, sitting under my trees during your little breaks like this was your home.” He stepped closer. His voice got louder. He wanted everyone to hear this part. “Let me tell you something about people like you, Andrew. You don’t build things. You don’t create things. You don’t design things. That’s not in your DNA. You’re the help. You’ve always been the help. Your father was the help and his father before him. That’s what your kind does. You serve. And when you forget that, when you come to a man like me with a piece of paper and try to pretend you’re something you’re not, this is what happens.” He held up the money, fanned it slow. “So let me give you a proper goodbye.”
He threw the money. Not handed—threw. The bills exploded from his hand and scattered across the lawn, catching in rose bushes, drifting into champagne glasses, landing in the grass at Andrew’s feet. “Take this money and get lost, you delusional fool.” Fifty guests held their breath. Andrew looked at the bills on the grass, then at Sterling.
“Sir, I have my dignity. I can’t.”
“Dignity?” Sterling barked a laugh, and one by one the guests laughed with him. Some nervous, some not. “Consider it charity, boy, because you’re fired.”
Andrew’s voice barely held. “Sir, I haven’t done anything wrong.” The laughter stopped. Sterling stepped forward until his shadow fell across Andrew’s face. The morning sun behind him made him look ten feet tall. “Your presence here is already a stain, boy. Someone like you was never meant to stand on my grass.” His voice dropped to almost a whisper, but the garden was so quiet that every person heard it. “Your kind doesn’t belong at tables like these. You don’t belong in gardens like this. The only reason you lasted three years is because I pitied you. And that pity just ran out.” He pointed at the money on the ground. “Now pick it up and get off my property.”
The garden was silent. A bee buzzed past Andrew’s ear. Somewhere a mimosa glass clinked against a tray. Nobody moved. Andrew looked down at the bills scattered across the grass he’d planted, the roses he’d pruned, the stone path he’d laid by hand. Three years of his life spread out under the morning sun. His fists clenched so tight his knuckles went white. His jaw locked. Something behind his eyes shifted—not anger, something deeper, something quieter. He knelt, picked up every bill one by one, folded them, put them in his pocket beside the torn drawing. Then he stood, looked Sterling Whitmore in the eye for two full seconds, and walked away. He passed the rose beds he’d planted three years ago. They were blooming—the fullest bloom of the season. The most beautiful things in that entire garden. He didn’t look at them. He walked through the iron gate and didn’t look back. Behind him, the jazz quartet started playing again. The mimosas resumed. The laughter returned as if nothing had happened at all.
