Chapter 22 #2
I sniffle. Squeeze his hand. "I watched her take the keys from the valet, and god, he was starstruck.
You'd think she was Nicole Kidman, the way he was looking at her.
I mean, I get it, though. She was gorgeous.
Same height as me, but the fat ass gene skipped her.
" Another pause, swallowing hard. "She drove away, and I never saw her again.
No one heard from her that night or the next day, so Mom went over to her place to check on her.
Found her in her garage, in her car. She'd run a hose from the tailpipe. She’d written 'I'm sorry' in the fog on the window. "
"For what?" he asked.
"Exactly what we all went crazy asking ourselves.
Dad went haywire. Spent hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping it out of the news.
We weren't, like, nationally famous to any degree, but around the city, we were pretty well known, and he—it was something he could do, I guess.
Because no one could understand why. It hit Mom harder than anyone.
She found her, and…Mom never got over it.
But that came later. I'm the one who figured it out. I was the only one who could stomach the task of going through her stuff, packing it up, all that. I had to go through her personal information—her finances. And that’s when I found out what had happened. "
"God, Brys. That shouldn't have been on you."
I shrug. "Who else? A stranger? Some assistant from the office who didn't know her? Mom was catatonic, and Dad was running all over town handing out hush money to keep our shame out of the news cycle." I wince. "That's not fair. He was protecting our privacy. Anyway. It could only have been me."
"What did you discover, Brys?" Jakob prompts.
"A bad investment."
When I say nothing else, he frowns. "And?"
"A really, really big fuckup. She gambled and lost, that's the long and short of it.
But she lost big…really, really big. Catastrophic.
Dad had given her an account she could play with.
She'd grown it over the years from an initial seed of ten million into over two hundred million.
He bragged about that all the time. Well, she heard a pitch that sounded like a winner, and invested.
Just a little bit at first. But then they faltered and needed another cash infusion.
And then the markets had a bad day, and a bad week, and then a bad month, and they needed more.
She was already in for a ton of money, and she couldn't bear having to admit that she'd made a bad investment because she was the golden child, the wunderkind, the girl with the Midas touch.
So she just kept propping them up even after it should have been obvious they had no product, no real talent, and no future.
She should have known at any one of a dozen points to cut her losses and admit she had failed for the first time.
But she…she didn't. She should have known better than to keep dumping good money after bad, but she didn't."
Jakob hisses through his teeth. "Fuck."
I grin at him—it's weak, but it's there. "Swearing, right?"
"Who knew?" he teases.
The humor fades fast. "She must have panicked.
Moved money from the corporate accounts to cover her losses and kept propping them up with infusion after infusion, spent her lunch breaks visiting their headquarters, trying to force them to success on her own.
She nearly succeeded, I think, through sheer force of will.
She reorganized their leadership, streamlined their roster, simplified their short-term goals, and restructured their finances.
She had to have been working eighteen hours a day, because no one knew how much time she was spending there on top of her usual duties at B-D-I, which were not insignificant. "
"She hid it well, huh?" Jakob says.
I take his statement as rhetorical and keep going without addressing it. "The day she killed herself, she'd found out that the company had folded, taking with it everything she'd invested, which, when all was said and done, was nearly half a million dollars."
"Oh, Jesus."
"Yeah." I shake my head, blinking away tears.
"Dad would have forgiven her. He would have called it a very expensive lesson.
The company…it was a hit, but we survived.
We had to sell off a few assets to replenish our cash flow, but we survived it.
If she'd just…told someone…if she'd felt less pressure to be perfect.
If she'd…I don't know. I've gone over the what-ifs so many times over the years. I just…"
"Tell me, Brys." His hand crushes mine. "Tell me the thing you've never told anyone."
How can he see it?
"I'm angry at her!” I yell. “I’m furious!
I…I can't forgive her for it—for any of it.
Like, was she stupid? Four hundred and eighty-six million dollars?
Into a gamified fitness app? Really, Britt?
And…how did she not see that it was built out of nothing?
I took the most cursory of glances at the package they showed her, and I could tell it was all bullshit.
They had no talent behind the app—the coders were high school kids.
Which isn't necessarily a problem; I've invested in companies staffed by young talent.
But these kids weren't…god, it sounds bad, but they weren't talented enough. And for a fitness app, especially back then, when apps like that were a novelty? You need a name, and they had no one. Just some buff guys and gals that no one had ever heard of. It was obviously someone’s doomed dream that didn't merit her time, attention, or money.
And she should have seen that. It bothers me to this day that I still can't see why she was duped, what she saw that convinced her to put so much into it. "
"When you have the touch,” Jakob says, “it gets easy to think you can't fail. Your sister was charmed, it sounds like. She likely felt like not only couldn't she fail, as in she never had and never would, she also felt like she couldn't fail—as in wasn't allowed to."
"That tracks," I say. "I…yeah. I'm angry at her for just being so dumb.
I'm angry at her for hiding it. I'm angry at her for ab—for…
" my eyes fill, my throat goes thick and hot and tight.
"For abandoning me. She abandoned me. She—she took the easy way out. Left me the mess to deal with. Left me with a shattered mother and a devastated father and a family business that was suddenly on the hook for five hundred million dollars. I looked up to her, idolized her. Wanted to be her. And then the first time in her life that she messes up, she kills herself? It's cheap, and it’s weak, and it’s selfish, and I fucking hate her for it!
" I screech the last part, my voice cracking and breaking.
"Of course you do," Jakob murmurs. "How could you not?"
"She was my sister. How can I hate her so much?"
"It's easier to hate than to be sad."
I look at him. "I suppose." Now that it’s started, I can't seem to stop crying.
“It broke my mother, Jakob. Just broke her.
She started drinking and couldn't stop. And then it was drinking, plus sleeping pills and painkillers.
And then one day, a bit less than a year after Britt died, Mom just…
didn't wake up. An accidental overdose of a mixture of things, and her heart just stopped. "
"Dear lord, Brys."
"Dad hung on until I'd graduated with my MBA, and then he trained me to take his place. And then he had a heart attack." I can barely get words out, now. “I’m alone. My entire family is gone. They all left me. They all abandoned me. They all abandoned me."
I look at Jakob through tear-smeared eyes, barely able to see him through the salt haze. He lifts his hand, touches my jaw. "Come over here, Brys." He shifts to the far side of the hospital bed.
"No, you're hurt."
"Brys. Come here." It's The Voice—silky, dark, liquid, rich, smooth, humming with authority.
I hesitate, but then a lightning bolt hits me: why am I resisting? Why am I holding back? What I want more than anything is to just let him hold me while I fall apart.
So I climb onto the narrow bed beside him, careful not to put any weight on the wound site. His arm wraps around me, and he tucks my cheek onto his chest, and his hand smooths my hair.
For a moment or two, it's deliciously comforting.
And then it all hits.
Everything.
Fucking everything.
Britt being the favorite. Never being able to match up to her impossible standards.
Her suicide. My anger over it. My sense of betrayal and abandonment.
The sadness at the loss of a brilliant young woman, not just my sister but my friend, someone I looked up to—a bright light in a dark world snuffed out way too soon.
That's a sadness I've never let myself feel.
I've been too busy being angry and denying that I’m angry—too busy pretending I don't feel anything about it at all, because I've spent so long afraid of exactly this: the breaking.
And I know why, now: I've never had anyone I trusted to hold me when I broke. Charles was wonderful. Kind, supportive, romantic. But he had no emotional depth. He couldn't have handled me breaking like this. It would have been the end of us.
But Jakob?
He just holds me through it and lets me break. I'm safe with him. He's a hard place I can break against, and the soft place I can land when I'm done.
I cry for Britt. I cry for Mom—the same confusing mixture of sad and angry. For Dad, who died of sadness. For myself, for being the only one left. For all the times I've wondered if I should just join them.
I cry for all the awful things I've seen over the last few days.
And when I'm finally done weeping, I look up at him, and I know one thing for certain:
I love Jakob.