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 tosuccess 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…toldsomeone…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—foranyof it. Like, was she stupid? Four hundred and eighty-sixmilliondollars? 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 theyweren'ttalented enough. And for a fitness app, especiallyback 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 shecouldn'tfail—as in wasn'tallowedto."
"That tracks," I say. "I…yeah. I'm angry at her for just being sodumb. 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 tobeher. 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 Ifucking hate herfor 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,plussleeping 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.
