Page 1 of The Goat Next Door

1

Ember

“If you think this is bad,

you should see what I almost did instead.”

— Ember

The bank’s secure portal is judging me.

Or at least, that’s how it feels.

It’s sitting there on my laptop screen like a smug little rectangle of financial superiority, glowing bright white against the chaos of my studio apartment while casually displaying a number that has completely destroyed my ability to think like a normal human being.

$12,412,400.00

I keep expecting the number to update into something more reasonable.

Like $12,412. Or $12. Or “oops.”

A week ago, I was roughly forty-eight hours away from committing suicide by sheer corporate boredom.

My daily routine consisted of staring at logo guidelines for a dental insurance firm, drinking lukewarm office coffee, and listening to my boss, Marcus, tell me that my shades of blue weren’t “disruptive enough.”

Being a graphic designer for a PR firm meant working for men who didn’t know the difference between navy and midnight, yet wanted women to do all the heavy lifting only to take the credit for themselves.

I eventually quit, convinced I could reclaim my creative soul through freelancing.

It turned out, however, that the industry was just as soul-crushing on my own, and I ended up tethered to Marcus anyway, freelancing as a sub-contractor for his firm because it was the only way to pay rent.

It was a suffocating cycle of being underpaid and micromanaged by a man who couldn’t even pick a decent font.

Now, I have exactly twelve million reasons to never care about decent fonts ever again.

The wire transfer landed three hours ago, right after a painfully long conference call with the state lottery’s legal team.

The entire thing sounded like it had been narrated by people who ironed their socks for fun. They said life-changing words like asset distribution, verification process, and financial discretion in the exact same tone people use to explain printer maintenance.

During the call, I kept nodding even though they couldn’t see me, like that would somehow make me sound more financially responsible.

I even said “indubitably” at one point, a word I have never used in my entire life and one I instantly regretted.

I spent the entire forty-five minutes sitting cross-legged on my floor, staring at a grease stain on my kitchen wall and wondering if I was having a very specific, stress-induced stroke.

But the money is real.

It’s there.

If I hit refresh, the numbers don’t move. They don’t vanish. They just blink back at me, heavy and concrete.

I’ve checked twenty times.

My first instinct is that someone is going to knock on my door and politely ask for it back. Like I’ve accidentally stolen it by thinking about it too hard.

I briefly consider Googling “can money be a hallucination caused by burnout,” which feels medically plausible given my last years of employment.

My apartment, unfortunately, hasn’t caught the memo that I’m suddenly rich.