April 1 – The Ask

Book Three – Chapter 2

April 1 – The Ask

DarkEvil Dominion looked different in spring light. The logo on the glass caught the sun in a way that made the letters glow, and every time I walked past the hallway where Company turned into Dominion, I felt that same quiet shock I’d felt on the mountain when the boys first told me the name.

That morning, I was in my office with the door half-open, half buried in a contract from one of our partners. Blue sunglasses on, ring catching the light, a mug of coffee slowly going cold beside my keyboard.

Outside, the office hummed.

Operations in one wing. Corporate in another. Dominion’s creative rooms tucked into the far side.

I had no idea that my sons were in the break room preparing to ruin my peaceful morning.

Sean paced in front of the table, his badge twisted against his hoodie, phone in hand. The official lineup had finally dropped a few days earlier, turning all the rumors he’d been following into something real.

He’d watched the poster go live and just stared.

Then he’d shown Grayson.

They hadn’t shown me.

Not yet.

“Are we really doing this today?” Sean asked, thumb worrying the edge of his phone case. “On April first? He’s gonna think we’re messing with him.”

“That’s exactly why it works,” Grayson said, sitting on the edge of the table with his arms crossed. “If we tell him on April first and we’re dead serious, he’ll know we’ve thought about it. Nobody plans a fake Coachella pitch this hard.”

Sean groaned.

“I hate that you’re right.”

Grayson slid off the table.

“Okay. Last run-through. We’re not walking in there and saying, ‘Please, Dad, take us to a festival.’ We’ve actually thought this through.”

“Right.”

Sean ticked the points off on his fingers.

“One: some of the partners and people we work with are already looking at festival-related projects and media work. If there’s a legitimate way for us to be involved, we might be able to arrange better access instead of going in completely on our own.”

“Good,” Grayson said. “Two.”

“Two: if we’re there partly through company connections, we’re not just random plus-ones. You’re Vice Chairman and Co-Founder. I’m Corporate Executive Officer. We’d actually have responsibilities.”

“And three,” Grayson said, “Dad.”

Sean stopped pacing.

“Dad,” he repeated.

“His knee. His back. The crowds. The heat. Everything else.”

Sean nodded.

“We don’t throw him into some dusty parking lot with a cheap tent and tell him good luck.”

“Exactly.”

“So we fly,” Sean said. “No driving across the country. We arrange transportation once we’re in California, and if the partner side actually comes together, we find out what kind of premium setup they can arrange for us.”

Grayson nodded.

“Real beds.”

“Real beds.”

“Bathrooms.”

“Absolutely bathrooms.”

“Showers.”

Sean pointed at him.

“Non-negotiable.”

“And somewhere he can get away from everything for a while.”

Sean’s expression softened.

“Yeah,” he said. “Especially that.”

The plan wasn’t finished.

They didn’t know exactly what kind of passes they’d have, exactly where they’d sleep, or exactly what the partner arrangements would cover.

But they knew what they weren’t asking me to do.

No cross-country drive.

No sleeping in the dirt.

No throwing me into three days of crowds without somewhere to retreat.

And, most importantly, no pretending this was anything other than something Sean desperately wanted to experience.

“He’s still going to look at me like I’m insane,” Sean said.

“Probably,” Grayson agreed. “He did that with Shenandoah too.”

Sean looked at him.

“And then we got the mountain pictures.”

That got a smile out of him.

“Okay,” Sean said. “We do it together.”

“Together.”

They walked down the hall side by side.

As they passed the glass, Sean’s reflection overlapped with the Dominion logo. For a moment, his face and the name existed in the same pane.

He wondered what the version of himself still sitting in high school would have thought if he’d seen this.

Him.

Inside his father’s company.

Wearing a corporate badge.

Walking toward Michael Thomas’s office to ask that same father if he wanted to fly across the country and stand in a California desert listening to music with his sons.

Grayson knocked on my doorframe.

“Got a minute?”

I looked up from my screen.

Both of my sons were standing there.

Grayson was trying to look professional, which would have worked better if he wasn’t half smirking.

Sean wasn’t smirking at all.

His fingers kept tapping against his phone.

Immediately, I knew this wasn’t about a small problem.

“Sure,” I said, leaning back. “Close the door.”

Sean did.

My office had changed since winter.

The trio mountain photo was framed on the wall now—three figures on a stone overlook, leaning into each other. Underneath it, in small, clean type, Grayson had added a label:

DarkEvil Company & DarkEvil Dominion – Founding Leadership

Shenandoah, March 13, 2026

It made the whole room feel less like a bunker and more like a place where a life was being built.

“So,” I said. “Which one of you broke something?”

“Not yet,” Grayson said. “We’re here to ask permission before we break anything.”

I looked from him to Sean.

Sean swallowed.

“It’s about April,” he said. “And a… trip idea.”

My eyebrows rose.

“I just got back from the mountains. You two trying to turn me into a travel influencer?”

“Not exactly,” Grayson said.

Sean stepped forward.

“You know Coachella, right?”

I blinked.

“The festival?”

“Yeah.”

“Big desert thing. Palm trees. Giant crowds. Artists I pretend to recognize.”

Sean laughed nervously.

“Yeah. That one.”

He pulled up the lineup poster on his phone and turned the screen toward me.

I recognized enough names to understand immediately why he’d been staring at it.

“They actually did it,” I said.

Sean’s face changed.

“You know them?”

“I live on the internet,” I said. “I’m not completely ancient.”

Grayson snorted.

“Debatable.”

I ignored him and looked back at Sean.

“Why are you showing me this?”

Grayson nodded toward his brother.

“Because he wants to go.”

Sean glanced at him.

“And,” Grayson added, “I kind of do too.”

Then he looked at me.

“We don’t want to do it behind your back or make it some weird thing where we’re asking you to fund a vacation we’re taking without you. We want to do it as us.”

I shifted in my chair.

“Us meaning…?”

“Family,” Sean said.

Grayson smiled.

“And, potentially, a little business.”

There it was.

I pointed at him.

“I knew there was a spreadsheet hiding somewhere.”

“Not yet.”

“That’s worse.”

Sean laughed, but the nerves returned almost immediately.

“I’ve been watching the rumors for a while,” he said. “I didn’t tell you because it was just people guessing, and I didn’t want to turn it into this huge thing if none of it was real.”

He looked down at his phone.

“But now it is.”

His voice grew quieter.

“And after Shenandoah… I don’t know.”

He stopped.

I waited.

That was something I’d been trying to get better at with Sean.

Waiting.

Not filling every silence for him.

Not assuming that because I could sense emotion, I understood the reason behind it.

Finally, he looked at me.

“I want to go,” he said.

The words were simple.

The way he said them wasn’t.

“Not just for the music. I want the whole thing. The desert. The lights. The ridiculous crowds. Something huge that I actually chose.”

He took another breath.

“And I want to go with you.”

That caught me.

“To stand out there and see all of it,” he continued, “and then look over and see you there too. In the sunglasses. With us. Not sitting back home watching somebody else’s livestream.”

I stared at him.

For a moment, every old reflex in me rose at once.

Too far.

Too crowded.

Too loud.

Too hot.

Too unpredictable.

No.

Then I thought about Shenandoah.

I thought about the conversations we’d had there—not supernatural revelations or some magical connection between us, but the harder, more ordinary truths.

Sean telling me what those years had been like while I wasn’t really part of his everyday life.

What high school had felt like.

How much he’d kept to himself.

How strange it was trying to build something with me now when we’d missed so much time getting here.

I thought about the camera in his hands.

The pictures.

The nights when we’d talked longer than either of us meant to.

And I thought about the promise I’d made to both of my sons years ago.

They weren’t supposed to make themselves smaller just because their father sometimes struggled with the world around him.

“You realize Coachella is in California,” I said slowly.

“Yes.”

“We live in Virginia.”

“We checked.”

Grayson stepped in.

“We’re not driving. We’d fly out and arrange transportation there. And before you say anything, nobody is asking you to sleep in the dirt.”

“That was going to be my next question.”

“I know.”

Sean stepped closer.

“We’ve been looking at the partner side too. Nothing is finalized yet, but some of the people we work with may have festivalrelated media or activation work happening out there. If that comes together, they may be able to help arrange premium access and a better base for us.”

“A base?”

“Somewhere comfortable,” Grayson said. “Not regular car camping. Something set up properly. Beds. Power. Better bathroom and shower access. Somewhere we can sit down and get away from the crowd when we need to.”

Sean nodded.

“And if the partner thing doesn’t work?”

“Then we don’t pretend it did,” Grayson said. “We look at the real cost and decide from there.”

That answer I liked.

No promises.

No imaginary VIP treatment.

No spending money we hadn’t agreed to spend.

Just a possibility.

I looked back at Sean’s phone.

“You’re actually asking me to go to Coachella.”

“As my dad,” Sean said.

He hesitated.

“And as Dark Evil.”

I looked over the top of my glasses at him.

“Those are apparently two different jobs now?”

Sean smiled.

“Sometimes.”

I sat back.

Even thinking about a festival that size brought a familiar pressure to the edge of my awareness.

Thousands upon thousands of people.

Emotion.

Intent.

Excitement.

Stress.

Arguments.

Fear.

Joy.

Everything layered together.

My glasses could filter the worst of it.

They couldn’t make me invincible.

But sitting in front of me weren’t thousands of strangers.

There were my sons.

Grayson was already turning the entire problem into logistics in his head.

Sean was standing there asking me for something he genuinely wanted.

“If I say no,” I asked quietly, “what happens?”

Sean swallowed.

“Then we stay here.”

I waited.

“We watch the streams. We hang out at HQ. We don’t die.”

That got a small laugh out of me.

“I’ll be disappointed,” he continued. “But I’ll get it. I’m not going to hate you because you don’t want to fly across the country and stand in a desert with a hundred thousand people.”

He met my eyes.

“But I wanted to ask.”

The room went still.

Outside my office, somebody laughed.

A printer started somewhere down the hall.

I looked at the photograph on my wall.

Then back at Sean.

When he was younger, there had been years when I wasn’t there for things I should have been there for.

I couldn’t go backward and fix those.

But I could decide what I did when my son stood in front of me now.

“How long?” I asked.

Grayson straightened.

“The festival runs across two weekends. We’re talking about the first one.”

“Just the first one?”

“That is currently the proposal,” he said.

I narrowed my eyes.

“Why did you say that like a lawyer?”

“Because I work here.”

Sean covered his mouth, trying not to laugh.

I shook my head.

“And you two are sure you want me there? You don’t just want to go together?”

Sean answered before Grayson could.

“Yes.”

There wasn’t any hesitation.

“The whole point is you being there.”

Grayson nodded.

“If you stay home, we’ll spend the entire time sending you pictures anyway.”

“That’s not the persuasive argument you think it is.”

“It means you’ll suffer either way.”

I stared at them.

Then I took a breath.

“All right.”

Sean blinked.

“All right?”

“All right,” I repeated. “We investigate it.”

His mouth opened.

I raised a finger.

“Investigate. That is not the same thing as me handing you my credit card and telling you to go destroy California.”

Grayson grinned.

“Understood.”

“We talk to Sean Williams and the rest of corporate leadership. We find out what’s actually happening with these partner arrangements. We find out what they cover, what they don’t cover, what kind of access is real, and what this would cost us personally.”

Sean was trying very hard not to explode.

“If it makes sense,” I continued, “then we go.”

His face broke into a grin.

“Together?” he asked.

“Together.”

Sean exhaled like he’d been holding that breath since he walked through the door.

Grayson was already reaching for his phone.

“I’ll start a shared document. Flights, transportation, partner contacts, packing, accessibility, schedules—”

“Quiet time,” I interrupted.

He looked up.

“If we’re doing this, we do it with some rules.”

Sean nodded immediately.

“I keep the glasses on whenever I need them. We build in breaks. Nobody gets offended if I need to get away from the crowd. Nobody decides we’re pushing through something because we’ve already paid for it.”

“Deal,” Sean said.

“Deal,” Grayson echoed.

“And,” I added, “I get an actual bed.”

Sean laughed.

“You are getting a bed.”

“A real one.”

“Yes.”

“Not an inflatable mattress somebody calls a luxury sleep experience.”

Grayson held up both hands.

“We will put Michael requires an actual mattress in the contract.”

“Good.”

Sean smiled then—wide, unguarded, and still a little stunned.

“Happy April first, Dad.”

I stared at him.

Then I looked at Grayson.

Then back at Sean.

“You know,” I said, “when you told me you wanted to talk on April Fool’s Day, I was prepared for a bad prank.”

Sean’s grin widened.

“This isn’t the prank.”

I froze.

Grayson immediately started laughing.

“Sean.”

“What?”

“Do not say that to him.”

I pointed toward the door.

“Both of you out of my office before I change my mind.”

Sean laughed all the way into the hallway.

And despite myself, I was laughing too.