Page 60 of Dark Endures

What if Waylon took the money and ran with his family instead of paying the loan shark? If television can be believed—which is almost never—the loan shark would hunt them down and kill them.

That isn’t an option, even if it’s improbable.

I fill out the check that’s going to virtually empty my account. A part of me breathes a sigh of relief that my brother will be safe, and the other part withers and dies at the overwhelming fear that my buffer disappeared with a few strokes of a pen, not that I should need a buffer. My apartment is in better condition than when I signed the rental agreement.

Everything will be fine.

Everyone will be fine.

***

Everything isn’t fine.

The endorphins from speed walking home should have relaxed the tightness in my chest, instead, my ears are starting to ring.

There’s no place to pace in my apartment, and it’s getting dark outside. My neighborhood isn’t really one where you wander around at night.

Winnie… I can call Winnie. She always knows what to say.

“Hey, Mindy,” she answers. “How are you?”

“Have you ever felt like your world turned upside down, but nothing really changed?” the words spew out, probably in a garbled mess.

“Yes.”

There’s the calm, practical answer I need. What I’m feeling is completely normal.

“When my sister, Elynne, moved to the islands to live with her best friend, Bodhi, nothing changed in my life. I fly out to spend a couple of weeks several times a year there and I seeher for family-mandated dinners. That’s all we’ve ever seen of each other since we were kids and my parents sent us to different boarding schools.”

Cruel. It was plain old cruel to send them to different places. Fine, Winnie’s parents didn’t want to be bothered with their kids, but at least let the siblings get the opportunity to be together. “Didn’t they take away her trust fund?”

“They tried. My parents hated the fact that she didn’t marry Bodhi and live life the way they were expected to in Urbium, but Grandpa set up a rock-solid trust. The only thing they could do was delay her from receiving funds until she’s thirty-five.”

Being rich and then having it all disappear had to be way more terrifying than my situation. “They wanted to decide who she married? I thought we’d learned it was disastrous to try to control people that way generations ago.”

Winnie’s brittle laugh could compete with fingernails on a chalkboard. “My parents are in a whole other world sometimes. They think women should get married as soon as possible and produce all the children they can. The fact that I haven’t married yet… But at least I didn’t move to the islands.” Her voice has a wistful note to it.

“Do you want to?” I ask another question that’s none of my business.

“Sometimes. But my grandfather loved the fact that I would be the one running his empire. It’s not every day you get the opportunity to do something that has an impact on the world around you.”

Not many women who look like Winnie and have more money than most of the world would love a job in waste management. I don’t even like cleaning my bathroom. And she gets hands-on with every stage of her company’s business,working from the ground up to assess problems and processes. “I couldn’t do your job.”

This laugh is a bit lighter. “Coming from the woman that literally talks people off the edge and listens to people die, my job seems easy.”

Death isn’t as hard as listening to a scared child or worse, one in pain… those cries echo through my head for weeks. “But I also help save lives.” Those people who reach out to say thank you or send pictures that wouldn’t have existed without me balance out the bad days.

“It has to be amazing to know someone got to live because of you.”

“Yeah.” Remember the good. I glance over at my nightstand, where there’s a picture of my brother and his little family smiling. It’s worth every cent.

“Are you ready to talk about what happened today?”

“No.” Because if I mention anything about money, you’d hand it to me without hesitating. I never want to be that poor friend mooching off her rich ones.

“Whenever you’re ready, give me a call.”

***

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