“It’s all going to the Philippines,” Toby had said, but he was wrong.
Instead of demanding the money to give over to their… religious organisation… his parents had told him to keep it. Maybe they felt guilty for abandoning their only son. Maybe they wanted Mopsy to be provided for in her old age. Either way, he suddenly had more money than he could have earned in a decade.
The old Toby Tennant would have bought a two-bedroom apartment in Coburg. The new Toby Tennant quit his job working under Scott Sanderson and spent thirteen sleepless nights researching cryptocurrency. At 1 a.m. on a Tuesday, he’d stumbled onto a Reddit thread about ZenithCoinX—a token created by finance grifter Max Maven. All signs pointed to Maven preparing to artificially inflate the coin via his influencer friends and their collective millions of followers, but there were no safe bets in finance. Sweating bullets, Toby had put every dollar he had into Zenith, buying almost two hundred thousand coins for three dollars each via multiple anonymous crypto wallets.
A month later, Zenith’s value rose to almost fifteen hundred per coin. He stayed awake for four days and three nights, constantly refreshing CoinCodex, his guts knotted tighter than Mick Jagger’s pants. The second ZenithCoinX dipped half a percentage, he liquidated his original investment for two hundred and sixty-two million dollars.
It was the slimiest thing he’d ever done, essentially propping up a pump-and-dump scheme, but it was legal in the near lawless world of cryptocurrency, and when ZenithCoinX tanked a week later, Max Maven was the hardest hit, losing all the moneyhe’dhoped to withdraw to an unknown CryptoTitan from Australia. Reddit was shocked, TikTok was stunned, and Toby Tennant from Hoppers Crossing was a multimillionaire.
There were no safe bets in finance.
Quietly terrified and unable to see the money as anything but numbers on a screen, he’d quickly divested, buying the St Kilda house and an investment property in Japan, creating a defensive stock portfolio, and donating ten million to a financial aid charity. It eased his conscience—and offset some of the capital gains tax he rightfully had coming his way.
That still left him with a hundred million dollars in liquidity.
He wanted to travel the world, to swim on the beaches of Sri Lanka, walk the Great Wall, and ski the French Alps. But he wanted to do all that with Tabby, and he knew he wasn’t ready to return to her yet.
The day she’d made him a man, he’d known she saw him as nothing more than a friend. He’d vowed to become worthy of her respect—an equal to her beauty, intelligence, and experience. Showing up at Silver Daughters, essentially unchanged but with a bunch of money he’d made on Reddit, would have made her piss herself laughing at him. Probably on her way to fuck some douchebag performance artist.
He’d gotten rich, but he was still a fucking dork. He needed to start construction on becoming the kind of man she couldn’t deny.
So, bored of thinking about his bank balance, he’d gone to Prestige Asset Management in South Yarra and asked for an advisor role. Eight minutes into a meeting with the chief investment officer, he was offered a corner office and introduced to Maisy Collins. She was the second woman to completely change his life, though entirely different from the way Tabby DaSilva had.
A hardass, triple divorced, Jennifer Coolidge-style blonde, Maisy was fifty-two with lips full of filler and walk-in closets full of Vuitton. She loved champagne and designer handbags, called everyone ‘dahling’ and didn’t give a single fuck about people thinking she was a cliché.
In his first week, she took him out for dinner, which became karaoke and bottomless negronis, and he ended up telling her everything about everything: Tabby, the crypto, even his parents’ move to the Philippines. It had been reckless, spilling his guts like that, let alone to someone he worked with. But whether it was luck or fate guiding his stupid drunk tongue, it had set him on exactly the right path.
“I wanna call my parents,” he drooled at the night’s end. “They might… they might wanna see me.”
“Fuck your parents, dahling,” Maisy had said, steering him toward a black taxi. “We’ll do brunch tomorrow, okay?”
Brunch turned into a Collins Street shopping spree in which Maisy got him measured for three eye-wateringly expensive bespoke suits.
“I’ve already got one,” he said as the tailor stabbed pins dangerously close to his dick. “A nice one. Armani.”
“Off the rack Armani,” Maisy sniffed. “Why don’t you just go to Mensland and buy one of those hideous check pattern shirts with the droopy collars and be done with it?”
At her insistence, he’d given her a tour of his new St Kilda home, which Maisy described as “More barren than my uterus. You think you’d have bought plates from Tarjay orsomething.”
Maisy volunteered, no,demanded, to decorate his house, picked out all the art and appliances and ordered furniture with price tags that would have made his mother slap him. Even his scarlet Lamborghini was her idea. He’d told her he wanted a sports car but was worried about what everyone would think. Maisy had looked at him like he was crazy. “Everyone will think you’re an arsehole, dahling. That’s entirely the point.”
Over and over again, he offered to pay her for her time, and she waved him away as she waved away all brown liquor and gluten.
“I’ve always wanted to be a fairy godmother, dahling, and while I’d prefer a sad little girl with glasses, you’ll do. And as it’s wine o’clock, should we go to Rufio for nibbles?”
There was never a question of romance between them. Maisy saw him as a kind of overgrown labradoodle, adorable but not remotely sexual, which didn’t stop her from coaching him with women. At first, he’d been humiliated by the fact Maisy remembered every drunken word he’d said about Tabitha DaSilva and his all-too-recent virginity. But she’d assisted him in the same frank, ‘isn’t it obvious, dahling?’ way as she’d organised his potted plants.
“You need experience and a lot of it,” she’d told him over oysters. “Good, bad, ugly. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. And it would be best if you could stop squirming whenever a girl looks at you as though you’ve got an ant’s nest in your underwear.Veryunsettling. When we’re done with mains, we’ll make you a profile on whatever dating apps girls are flocking to these days and take it from there.”
“But I love Tabby,” he reminded her. “I want us to be together.”
“And you will be. But not before you’ve learned to hold your own. Right now, you’re raw; you must cultivate your power. Hone your skills, as it were.”
“What skills? I don’t have skills.”
Maisy eyed him beadily over her oyster fork. “You swiped millions of dollars from under a man’s nose. You’re holding your own beautifully at the office. You’re a killer, Toby. You just need more confidence. And to stop wriggling.”
He’d been dubious, but he shouldn’t have been. Maisy helped him set up a Tinder account and then sent him on dates, three or four a week. At first, he’d been so nervous he sweat right through his shirts, convinced he talked too much, drank too much, and looked like an idiot. Maisy refused to relent. She rehearsed small talk with him, chose dark bars and restaurants to go on dates and even—the memories still made him blush—made him practise flirting with her friends, a rowdy collection of equally divorced, equally hard-drinking interior decorators and luxury good consultants.
