"Then you have all of this money and no strings attached. Which seems too good to be true, which means it probably is."
I take the check back from her. The paper feels heavy. "What if I just paid the hospital? Just that. Nothing else. My mother gets taken care of, and I can still walk away if this turns out to be something awful."
"Except once you spend it, you can't give it back. And if this is illegal money, you've just made yourself an accessory."
"To what? Being helped?"
"To whatever they're hiding." Chloe's voice softens. "I know I sound paranoid. But this doesn't happen, Jade. People don't just give away this kind of money. There's always a catch."
She's right. I know she's right.
But I'm so tired of drowning.
"Make me a promise," Chloe says. "If anything feels wrong, anything at all, you tell me immediately. And we go to the police if we have to."
"Okay."
"And you don't make any big decisions without talking to me first."
"Okay."
"And you're careful. Whatever this is, whoever P.C. is, you don't trust them just because they gave you money."
I look at the check in my hands. Almost four hundred thousand dollars. Enough to save my mother. Enough to quit two of my three jobs. Enough to breathe.
"I'll be careful," I tell Chloe.
But we both know I'm going to deposit it.
Because when you're drowning, you don't ask questions about the lifeline.
You just grab it and hope it doesn't pull you under.
4
PHOENIX
The Pacific breaks against the rocks below my house. I’m supposed to be focused on the quarterly reports spread across my desk. Instead, I'm refreshing my bank account for the hundredth time today.
The check hasn't cleared.
Three days. I sent it three days ago, hand-delivered to her mailbox in that run-down building in Boston. She should have it by now. She should have opened it, stared at the number, wondered who the hell would send her that much money.
She should have done something.
I close the laptop and walk to the floor-to-ceiling windows that make up the entire west wall of my home office. The ocean stretches out forever, blue and endless under the California sun. My house sits on a cliff in Malibu, all glass and steel and expensive architecture. It's the kind of place that gets featured in design magazines, the kind of wealth that most people only see in movies.
I built this. Well, I built on top of what my father gave me, but the success is mine. Crawford Ventures started as family money and connections, but I turned it into something more. A tech investment firm with stakes in half a dozen startups thatare about to go public. I'm twenty-seven and worth more than most people will make in ten lifetimes.
None of it matters if she doesn't cash that check.
My phone buzzes. A text from Marcus Sullivan, my business partner.
Board meeting at 3. Don't be late.
I ignore it. The board can wait. The Singapore investors can wait. Everything can wait until I know she got the money.
I open my laptop again, but this time I navigate to a different site. A blog called "Green Eyes Dragon," hosted on some free platform that hasn't been updated in two weeks. The last post is titled "Drowning on Dry Land."
