Chapter Two
A WEEK LATER, Ted stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, a feeling of pressure on his chest. He wonders if he is about to have a heart attack. Well, that’s one way out, he thinks bitterly.
Ted’s financial crisis has been a slowly snowballing nightmare. When he married Jill, he let her believe that money would never be a problem. But it hasn’t worked out that way.
He’d inherited a bundle when his father died.
They’d put a lot of that into buying and renovating the brownstone.
The work had gone almost grotesquely over budget, but he was simply unable to deny his wife anything.
Those were heady days. It would have been fine if they’d been able to live on his salary afterward – it was respectable enough.
The house and cars were already paid for, after all.
But Jill had expensive tastes, and once he’d started wooing her with travel to Europe and the Caribbean, he didn’t feel he could suddenly say no.
They’d gradually begun eating into what capital he’d had left after finishing the renovation.
And then Jill had started floating the idea of starting her own art gallery some day, which he knew would cost a fortune.
This is where he could have said that they had to begin living within their means. He should have laid it out for her. But he didn’t want to disappoint her, to appear lesser in her eyes. He’d never been sure that she loved him as much, or as helplessly, as he loved her.
But now he is staring into the abyss. They are about to lose everything.
Because instead of facing reality, and asking her to face it with him, he’d started to borrow.
And to save himself, he’d begun taking greater financial risks in the hope of greater returns.
He’d seen it work for others. He’d seen it work for his brother, Greg, who was always banging on about no risk, no reward – and he’d made a fortune.
But Ted has never had very good instincts about the markets.
He’s essentially a client-relationship manager at his firm – an affable, charming person who meets with high-net-worth clients and reassures them that their financial goals are being met, based on advice from the firm’s team of financial geniuses.
His downward spiral had begun with taking out a small mortgage on the brownstone.
Jill hadn’t liked it, but he’d explained that it was a smart financial move: their money could make more invested.
When the bills started to come in faster than he could pay them, he’d gone to the bank – alone – to see about borrowing some money.
He couldn’t get a line of credit without securing it against the house, and Jill, being on the title, would have had to agree, and he didn’t want her to know.
Instead, he got a personal loan, using his sports car, a Porsche 911, as collateral.
He hadn’t had to tell Jill about that. Meanwhile, he’d tried his hand at some short-term investments, but overall, they’d made losses.
And then he’d overheard some of the investment guys at the office – mainly the young hotshot Jamie Pollard – talking about a ‘sure thing’.
He listened in and decided that this would be the solution to all his problems. It was as if he had gone mad.
The temptation to save himself was too much.
He had no ready cash, so he found a private, high-risk lender for a short-term loan, who hadn’t insisted on security – though the loan terms were almost criminal.
Ted was so sure he’d get the money back in spades in a couple of months that he was willing to take the risk.
He knew others in the firm were doing the same thing. He thought he’d make a killing.
At some point during that time, he’d seen Greg’s ex-wife, Minerva, who was a client, and he’d told her ‘off the record’ that he had a ‘sure thing’ that he was recommending to her strictly as a friend, rather than as her investment adviser, and that he was investing in it himself.
He’d convinced himself that it would pay off, that he would make both himself and Min a small fortune.
She would tell Greg – how gratifying that would be.
She’d gone ahead with it. And two months later, entirely unexpectedly, the stock tanked.
He remembers the moment so clearly – it was just three days ago.
Even now it brings on a cold sweat. He remembers sitting at his desk at work, staring at his computer with his office door closed, watching the stock in free fall, feeling that he was in free fall with it.
The stock had crashed and so had he. Enraged and panicking, he had confronted the cocky bastard Jamie Pollard, who’d given him the tip.
He’d resisted the urge to grab him by the lapels and slam him up against his office wall.
‘What happened, Jamie?’ he shouted, desperate. ‘What the hell happened?’
Jamie shrugged. ‘Calm down, Ted. We all lost on that one. Easy come, easy go.’ He looked back at Ted and added, ‘Get a grip.’
Ted felt both furious and humiliated. He glared back at Jamie, hating his guts.
Then he turned on his heel and tried to leave Jamie’s office with what little dignity he had left – there was nothing else he could do.
He’d gone home that night and pretended to Jill that everything was fine, but he could tell she knew something was wrong.
He knew they were almost ruined, and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep it from her. The effort was sucking out his soul.
The next day, Min had stormed into his office. ‘What the fuck, Ted?’ she said, confronting him, eyes ablaze. ‘What happened? You said this was a sure thing!’
He quickly closed his office door behind her. ‘That’s what I was told. I lost heavily too,’ he told her, trying to placate her. She was so angry she threatened to move her portfolio.
‘That’s your prerogative,’ Ted said. At that point, he was under such intense pressure that he didn’t really care.
He’d borrowed the money for that ruinous investment from a loan shark.
All he had left to get him out of this was the brownstone, and if he lost the brownstone, he was afraid he’d lose Jill.
So he didn’t much care if Min took her business elsewhere.
He would have been happy never to see her again.
But as she turned to leave, he said – it was a reflex, regretted immediately – ‘Please don’t tell Greg about this. ’ He hated how small he sounded.
She’d looked at him with contempt and left his office without answering.
Now, Ted is as good as finished. He stares at himself in the bathroom mirror before he begins to shave.
He really doesn’t see a way out. He can’t borrow any more money, and he can’t pay back what he’s already borrowed without heavily mortgaging or selling the brownstone.
Life as he knows it is over. He’s going to have to tell Jill.
Jill observes Ted carefully in the mirror of their en suite bathroom as he shaves before work.
He’s acting as though everything is normal, but there’s a heaviness about him, a repressed tension, a darkness in his eyes that wasn’t there even a few days ago.
She’s finding it harder and harder to ignore.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
She regards him for a moment. Finally, she says, ‘Don’t forget we have dinner with your brother tonight at the Odeon.’
‘Right. I haven’t forgotten.’
She sees his face tighten. Ted and his older brother, Greg, are civil to one another, but there’s always an undercurrent of rivalry. She would never describe them as close. She doesn’t particularly like Greg either. But he has invited them to dinner.
Now she wonders why.