But right now . . . he wasn’t the same person I knew. Something had changed when he moved in with me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I knew he had been struggling for a while, but he wouldn’t tell me what was going on, no matter how much I begged.
I pressed my palms together and took in slow, measured breaths. “What the hell is going on?”
“Nothing,” he groused as he scrolled his phone.
I scoffed before hissing through gritted teeth, “You don’t get to speak to me that way.” Fear knotted my throat. “Either you tell me exactly what’s going on andmaybeI won’t call the cops, or don’t tell me and Iwillcall them up right now. Take your pick.”
“Fuck off,” he grunted.
I grabbed my phone.
“Mia—”
“I gave you a choice,” I stammered as the tears rolled down my cheek.
Joel scrubbed his hands down his face. “Fuck. Just . . . Just put the fucking phone down.”
My trembling finger hovered over the last digit in 911. “You have three seconds.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow. I just wanna go to bed,” he groused.
I glanced down at my phone to finish dialing because I knew he was bluffing.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Fine. Jesus. We’ll talk.”
“Three seconds, Joel.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Two.”
He flipped me off.
“One.”
He clenched his jaw.
I shrugged and looked down at my phone. “Your choice.”
“I owe some money to a guy,” he blurted out before I could hit the one.
“Definesome,” I pressed with curiosity. Joel was a finance whiz. He didn’t pinch pennies, but he was smart about investing and saving. His job as a portfolio manager paid excessively well. So well, in fact, that I regularly regretted going into academia, no matter how much I loved it.
He swallowed. “A lot.”
“How much,Joel?”
Eyes that matched mine stayed trained on the pile of slowly thawing vegetables. “A hundred grand.”
“What?” I shrieked. “How?”
“Actually, a little more than that,” he said. “It’s more like . . . $101,014. And some change.”
“Pennies don’t matter when they’re tied tosix figures!”
Joel dug his hand into his hair. “I fucked up! Okay? Is that what you want to hear? Little Miss Perfectnevermesses up. I get it.I’mthe screwup.”
I was dizzy at the thought of Joel owing someone a hundred thousand dollars.Someone who was willing to hurt him to get it back.
