Chapter 3
AMELIA
“Stop looking at me like that,” Joel rasped from the couch where his knee was covered in as many ice packs and bags of frozen vegetables that I could find to hopefully slow the swelling. His knee still lay at an unnatural angle.
Coming home from the movies and finding my brother beaten on the floor of my apartment was not what I had in mind for the evening. I huffed and propped my hands on my hips as I tried to replace the fear with ire and annoyance.
It didn’t work.
“I’m calling the police,” I croaked as I blinked away burning tears.
“No,” he groaned, like this was some minor inconvenience. “I’ve already told you. Do not call them.”
“Someone broke into my apartment and bashed your knee in with a baseball bat!” I shrieked. “Peas and carrots aren’t going to cut it! You need X-rays and surgery!” I rubbed my temples as my heart raced. “I’m calling 911.”
“Let it go,” he hissed as anger flared in his eyes.
“You need an ambulance,” I snapped.
There were days it was great having Joel around. We generally got along well. It was nice having someone to pick up dinner for the two of us before coming home. Sure, he was a little on the messy side, but I didn’t mind.
. . . Most of the time.
He was my best friend. The two of us were inseparable as kids.
Most people chalked it up to the “twin thing,” but it was much simpler than that.
Joel had always been there for me. He was the one who scared away the bullies.
He was the one who cheered me up when my feelings had gotten hurt.
He was the one who watched every game with me.
He was the one who had championed me through every degree and graduation. He was my biggest fan and I was his.
Now, Joel was the only one I had left.
But right now . . . he wasn’t the same person I knew. Something had changed when he moved in with me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I knew he had been struggling for a while, but he wouldn’t tell me what was going on, no matter how much I begged.
I pressed my palms together and took in slow, measured breaths. “What the hell is going on?”
“Nothing,” he groused as he scrolled his phone.
I scoffed before hissing through gritted teeth, “You don’t get to speak to me that way.” Fear knotted my throat. “Either you tell me exactly what’s going on and maybe I won’t call the cops, or don’t tell me and I will call them up right now. Take your pick.”
“Fuck off,” he grunted.
I grabbed my phone.
“Mia—”
“I gave you a choice,” I stammered as the tears rolled down my cheek.
Joel scrubbed his hands down his face. “Fuck. Just . . . Just put the fucking phone down.”
My trembling finger hovered over the last digit in 911. “You have three seconds.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow. I just wanna go to bed,” he groused.
I glanced down at my phone to finish dialing because I knew he was bluffing.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Fine. Jesus. We’ll talk.”
“Three seconds, Joel.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Two.”
He flipped me off.
“One.”
He clenched his jaw.
I shrugged and looked down at my phone. “Your choice.”
“I owe some money to a guy,” he blurted out before I could hit the one.
“Define some,” I pressed with curiosity. Joel was a finance whiz. He didn’t pinch pennies, but he was smart about investing and saving. His job as a portfolio manager paid excessively well. So well, in fact, that I regularly regretted going into academia, no matter how much I loved it.
He swallowed. “A lot.”
“How much, Joel?”
Eyes that matched mine stayed trained on the pile of slowly thawing vegetables. “A hundred grand.”
“What?” I shrieked. “How?”
“Actually, a little more than that,” he said. “It’s more like . . . $101,014. And some change.”
“Pennies don’t matter when they’re tied to six figures!”
Joel dug his hand into his hair. “I fucked up! Okay? Is that what you want to hear? Little Miss Perfect never messes up. I get it. I’m the screwup.”
I was dizzy at the thought of Joel owing someone a hundred thousand dollars. Someone who was willing to hurt him to get it back.
“Getting a speeding ticket is messing up. A hundred grand? Are you out of your mind? Who the fuck did you get a hundred grand from, and what the hell happened to it? You don’t just lose that much money.” I pointed to his knee. “Obviously, you know who did this.”
“And you think I’m going to tell you?” Joel said with a caustic laugh. “You’ll just call the police. I might not be a genius like you, but I’m not stupid.”
“Well, apparently you’re not the smartest if you’re getting your knee bashed in by some masked assailant because you lost a hundred thousand dollars!”
I was angry. I was terrified. But most of all, I was upset and hurt that he didn’t tell me he was in trouble before now.
I collapsed into the chair beside my books and baseball memorabilia and dropped my head into my hands. “Why didn’t you tell me something was wrong before now?”
He looked away. “Moving in here was already humiliating enough. You’re my sister. I’m supposed to protect you.”
“I’m your older sister.”
“By four minutes,” Joel countered the way he aways did.
I clasped my hands together. “What is going on with you? Why’d you need that much money to begin with?”
Joel closed his eyes. “I just . . . I got in a bind. I made some bad moves and needed to get the accounts back to where they were.”
“I don’t speak “finance bro,”” I deadpanned.
He huffed. “I have this big client. He’s like . . . rich rich. He wasn’t happy with how conservatively I was managing his portfolio, so I made some risky investments.” He swallowed. “I lost it all. And then some.”
“So you—what? Took out a shady loan and put the money in his account so it looked like nothing ever happened?”
Joel nodded.
I raked my hand through my hair. “Why not just pull it back out and pay back whoever you borrowed it from so that they don’t come back to finish the job? Be honest with your clients and take your lumps.”
Joel swallowed. “I can’t.”
I dropped my head into my hands. “I’m trying my best right now, J. But you have to tell me the whole truth.”
“The investments I made were worse than I thought. The deficit kept growing no matter how much I threw into it.” He sighed. “I got fired.”
I blinked. “Fired? Fired!” I dug my hands into my hair. “You can’t be fired. You’ve been going to work every damn day. You told me you were working late yesterday! What the hell have you been doing?”
Joel swallowed. “I’ve . . . been going to Atlantic City to try to win enough money to pay back the loan. Once I clear the debt, I’ll work on getting another job. I can . . . I don’t know. Be a business consultant or something.”
I stammered, completely unable to pick one train of thought to follow. I wanted to rage. I wanted to chew him out. I wanted to strangle him. But that wouldn’t solve the situation at hand.
“What happens if you don’t pay it back?” I asked in a barely restrained yell. The last thing I wanted was for the neighbors to come over.
Joel clammed up, and I had my answer.
My eyes burned as reality set in. It didn’t matter why. It didn’t matter how. All that mattered was getting him out of this mess.
I was realistic enough to know that the world was a dark place, but that didn’t mean my world was. Now, everything was bleak grayscale.
“How long?” I asked.
Joel had closed his eyes and reclined as best as he could on the couch. “How long for what?” he grumbled.
I couldn’t believe him. Here I was, trying to figure this out, and he was taking a nap. “How long do you have left to pay it back? I’m guessing this isn’t the first visit you’ve gotten.”
Silence again. So I was right.
“Joel.”
He huffed. “A week.”
I blinked. “A week? And you didn’t think to tell me before this?”
Joel glared at me. “If I could walk into my room and lock the door right now, I would.”
“What do you have in your trust?” I asked. “Pay it out of that.”
“Not a hundred grand.”
“How much?”
He sighed. “Nothing.”
I blinked at him. “Nothing. How the hell do you have nothing left?”
Our parents had done well for themselves, building a lucrative media company and then selling it for a few million. Joel and I had been set up with trust funds, close to eighty thousand each, but our parents passed before we had been of age to access them.
“This isn’t the first time it’s happened,” he muttered.
“Joel!”
“I fucked up!” he shouted. “Okay? I get it. You don’t have to remind me. So unless you want to loan me what’s in your trust, get off my back.”
I sighed. “I have a little left in mine, but it’s not anywhere near what you need. It wouldn’t even put a dent in it.”
“Don’t get hurt falling from your high horse. What happened to all those full-ride scholarships, huh?”
“Fuck off. School was paid for. Living was not. Grad student stipends are literal pennies. If I didn’t have my trust, I would have been surviving on dry ramen and pancake mix.”
Living in New Haven could drain any bank account in the blink of an eye, but debating with Joel wasn’t productive. We needed a game plan, and we needed it now.
“How can I help?”
Joel glared at me through narrowed eyes. “This isn’t your problem.”
“Don’t start with that nonsense. Unless you can magically make a crap ton of money appear out of thin air, then yes, it is my problem.” I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees. “What’s the plan? I know you have one.”
“I don’t want to—”
“Joel.”
“I was trying to win some money down in Atlantic City.” He sighed. “It’s the only way I could think to get that much in time. Short of selling a kidney—”
“You have two kidneys,” I snapped. “You can part with one.”
“Kidneys aren’t worth enough to pay it off,” he rasped between calculated breaths. He cut his eyes at me. “I checked.”
“You’re right.” I sighed. “I read this article back in—I don’t know—2009? Black market kidneys were only worth ten grand. Even with today’s inflation, they’d still go for under twenty thousand.”
“Your brain is exhausting,” he muttered.