Chapter Seven #3
Nothing made me more sick than sitting downstairs in the ferry across the Sound, so I hiked up to the gallies again, and plunked down by a window. I watched the dock shrink as we moved away from the land on the 45-minute ride to the other side.
The piece of paper Tara had given me with her number crinkled in my hand again. I had shoved it in a pocket, but it was in my palm again. The numbers to her phone danced on the paper as I stared too long and too hard.
Then finally dialed.
“Andrej?” Her voice was low and quiet.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“I am so sorry. So sorry. He’s lost his mind. He’s raging outside, thankfully just chopping wood.”
“You don’t need to apologize, Tara.”
“I wish this wasn’t our first time meeting.
But... I’m going to tell you somethings that he thinks I don’t know.
You might be able to use them to get back into his circle, because I know this was all weird with you paying to date him.
.. Andrej, he really likes you. Really, really likes you.
You don’t have to pay him anymore. Just date him. ”
“He doesn’t want to see me. Ever again, from the way he was acting.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m going to infodump on you, Andrej, so you understand what’s going on, far beyond the rent-a-date stuff, okay?”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m on the boat for another forty minutes.”
“Good.” I could almost see her peeking out the curtains to make sure that her brother wasn’t coming back in the house.
“My brother is a financial genius. He’s good with money, really good. He has crazy instincts about it and earned his first million when he was just eighteen.
“The problem was that my parents are drug addicts. They aren’t bad people, but I wouldn’t call them good either.
They are self-centered, self-involved druggies.
They didn’t care much about anything except their next hit.
Growing up, sometimes they remembered we were their kids and fed us, and sometimes Quinn and I knew where all the soup kitchens were and what days they served and how much we could carry from the food bank.
He eventually found one of those carts that elderly people use to pull their groceries.
I think he stole it, but to this day, he said he just found it in front of the apartment door.
“It was a weird way to grow up because our parents managed to keep their jobs and keep the apartment and the bills paid. They just didn’t care about anything else except the next high.
They had always been druggies, my whole life.
I don’t remember them not being that way.
My mother was a nurse, ironically, and dad was some business manager.
I blame the cocaine parties dad had access to in the early nineties that kept them going back for more and more.
We were also born pretty late in their lives.
Mom was thirty-five, so I think they were drugged up from the seventies on. ..”
She paused and sighed. I was invested at this point. I had no idea where she was going.
“Quinn kind of blames them for my juvenile arthritis since mom wasn’t interested in quitting while she was pregnant with us. I don’t. We both would have had it since we’re twins. My geneticist was sure about that. I was the only one who got it, so it was just shit luck on my part.
“Anyway, you needed to know that to understand what’s going on--”
“He doesn’t think that I’m doing drugs, does he?”
“Not at all. He had a date or two with people who were into substances, and he put them all the never again list immediately. It’s not that, but it is related.
“Quinn fought for every treatment I ever received. He was the one who figured out our parents’ insurance, and how to get me to the doctors, how to pay the bills, how to order medicine. What to do, what to say, to make sure that I got the treatment I needed, with or without our parents there.
“And somewhere along the line, he decided that we would never have to fight for money and treatment again, and discovered he was really good with money.
He managed to parlay the little paycheck he would get from his job at bookstore into a million dollars with the power of investment.
He was also using the money to buy more books, and he managed to fund his whole Columbia University finance degree with that bookstore job.
“The problem was, my parents helped themselves to a lot of the money he made. I don’t know how my dad—blitzed out of his fucking gourd ninety percent of the time he wasn’t at work—found the accounts, but he and mom got even worse once they didn’t have to watch how much they used to get high.
“They used up so much of the money... they managed to snort the entire apartment and bill system my brother had right up their nose. We wound up in a horrible, roach infested apartment in Queens, far away from the lovely three bedroom we’d had in Manhattan our whole lives.
“Quinn changed all the accounts as soon as he found out what was going on and got a two-bedroom apartment back in Manhattan. The day he signed that paper, we were out of there—it took six months for us to escape because they’d drained him so bad.
“Once we were out, things got so much better.” I could hear the relief in her voice. “I was never so glad that my brother was a genius as I was the day we walked out of that shit pit where my parents had to live.”
“Did they ever try to get clean?” I asked, remembering I was in this conversation.
“Nope. No interest. They loved being high. I’m shocked they’re still alive.” She sighed. “That’s not even the part of the story that I need to get to. You should have another half an hour on the ferry.”
“Yup.” I looked out at the slowly growing skyline.
“Okay, I’ll try to speed up.”
“It’s a mobile phone, Tara, take as long as you need.”
In my head, she nodded with a goofy smile. “Right. Mobile phones. So. Now we get to the really fucked up part of this story.”
“That wasn’t fucked up?”
She laughed. “My brother always knew he was gay, let’s just get that out of the way.
I’m bi. Genetics, you know? He started dating Kyle in college.
Sophomore year. It only took one look at the apartment to convince Kyle that my brother was a target not a boyfriend.
He managed to worm his way into our lives, into the apartment and by the time my brother graduated, Kyle had managed to steal an entire investment account from my brother to the tune of millions.
He didn’t know about the other accounts, so it was just the one.
“It was that legal fight that convinced me to go to law school and learn how to help people fight these kinds of financial manipulations. Quinn was not the only one who has been through this. It’s terrible what people do.
“The system worked this time, and most of the stolen money was either returned or needed to be paid back. Kyle was broke and would probably never have money to his name again. Quinn was nice and said that the restitution of the remainder could be dismissed.
“The truth was that he just didn’t want to have Kyle in his life anymore, and I didn’t blame him. Kyle was horrible.
“He didn’t have any interest in dating until he met Jarrett. Jarrett was delightful. Kind, interested, polite, and after a while, he was just part of our lives.
“Quinn was getting ready to propose, honestly. We thought that everything was going great, and we were going to be a great little family. Except when Quinn decided to see if they could do a surprise wedding instead of an engagement, the license couldn’t be issued.
“Jarret was already married.”
“Oh, no.”
“And again, here we go with ramping the crap up, because this involved me, and Quinn is incredibly protective of me so it’s not a good thing.”
I heard her sit on a squeaky bed and let out another sigh. “I had made friends with a girl named Lia while I was in law school. I’d been interested in more than friends, but she didn’t swing that way, so I settled for being really good friends. Nothing wrong with that. We all need friends.
“Problem was, she was attracted to Jarrett. I had no idea. Quinn had no idea. And apparently Jarrett had been playing the long game as a closet bi because that’s who he was married to.
At some point, in the few years before, he and Lia had gotten married, all while he was still was living with us, sleeping with Quinn, and fucking us over very neatly. ”
“No!”
“Third time,” she sighed. “Three times my brother has been cheated out of his money. Millions of dollars, each time. Jarrett and Lia were good at it though. They moved the money around so that it couldn’t be traced and moved a lot of it overseas.
We’ve never been able to find it. It was all gone. All of it.
“We left. Quinn honestly thinks that I know nothing about any of this, but I don’t know why. I think that it makes him feel better about the whole thing, but I don’t care. He’s taken care of me no matter what the situation, no matter what kind of money he has. No matter where we were.
“No lie, one of the best things that he’s ever told me was that we were leaving New York and moving to Seattle.
One of the best. I loved the trip he planned, and I love this place.
I am working on getting my bar in this state and I can’t wait to really be a part of the culture and life here.
Yeah, the humidity and rain are a bitch on my arthritis, but medicine and physical therapy has been amazing.
“Here’s where we are in the story, though. A few days ago, Quinn noticed some unusual activity in his accounts. He’s only just started to build them back up and he’s like a hawk at this point.
“There were three breaches in the security in the past month, and then this week there was an attempt to make a major withdrawal at the same time someone was trying to obtain a mortgage with his name.”
“Oh,” I breathed.
“I’m a little guilty in all this,” she said, a sigh escaping. “Though I don’t feel bad about my intentions, my timing was shit. I was trying to convince Quinn to just date you. No money, no arrangements, no rent-a-date stuff. Date you. Like for real.”
“Oh, no,” I said, my head thunking against the glass.
“You see the problem already. At the same time, I’m here trying to convince him to date, here’s something funny starting up with the money again. It’s all bad timing.”
“He thinks I’m trying to steal his money.”
“It’s all timing.”
“I’m not.”
“Dude, I know,” she said, then cleared her throat with a guilty sound.
“I’m a lawyer. I’m not letting anyone near my brother anymore without a background check.
You have zero reason to steal his money.
He, on the other hand, has been ripped off three separate times, with massive consequences from people playing the long game. ”
“I want to date him.” The words blurted out. “I do. I don’t want the scheduling thing or the money or anything in our way. But...”
“Give us... give me a few days. This all came to a head yesterday, and I need time to investigate. I think I can talk him down, but I need to find out what’s going on. Where are these attacks coming from? Just...”
“Give you time. Got it. I can do that. And I'm not going to book through Foxy anymore.” A spike of jealousy went through me, and I cleared my throat. “Well, I’d also like to request that he take himself off the roles at Foxy’s too...”
“Smitten,” she snickered. “Let’s work on getting his blood pressure down before we start going caveman, okay?”
“Deal.” I agreed wholeheartedly. “Keep in touch?”
“Absolutely, I might need your help.”
“I’m here, waiting.”