Page 53 of The Lake Escape
He fixated on her with those awful bloodshot eyes, drooping with remorse. The smell emanating from him was potent, but it was still his face, the same mouth Julia had kissed thousands of times. Seeing him like this was both familiar and strange, an unwelcome visitor from the past.
She gripped the table’s edge to keep upright, but the room spun anyway, her world tilting at an unnatural angle.
“Christian, you need to tell me what is going on. Where did you get the whiskey, and more importantly, why are you drinking it?”
His hand unsteady, Christian slowly raised the glass to his lips and drank again. Julia didn’t have it in her to knock it away. Instead, she watched him finish the contents in one long gulp.
In the ensuing silence, a worst-case scenario occurred to her: he was about to confess to murdering Fiona. It would be Christian, her beloved husband, who would lead the police to the body.But no. That was insane. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t.Still, he hadn’t answered her.
Confronting a drunk with anger was as effective as debating people online. So she asked again, in a patient voice, tempering her fury by touching his hand.
His eyes were so wounded that she felt injured herself. Her face softened, giving Christian the security he needed to open up.
“I didn’t get it,” he said, as if she should know what he was talking about. “It didn’t come through.”
He picked up his phone from the table, staring at it morosely, as if the device had somehow betrayed him. His face knotted up. Julia thought he might burst into tears, but instead his lips curled into a vicious snarl. His forehead blanketed into deep creases, red splotches erupting on his neck and cheeks.
In one swift motion, he cocked his arm back and thrust it forward. The phone flew from his grasp, sailing across the room, where it slammed against the wall over the stove.
Julia jumped at the sound of the impact, but Christian didn’t flinch. Perhaps he’d wanted a more dramatic result, but the phone fell to the ground mostly intact, save for the splintered screen. Whatever he was trying to get out of his system hadn’t been purged, and Christian winced in agony.
“Christian—Jesus Christ. What didn’t come through?” Julia asked. “What is happening?”
“The loan,” he sobbed, burying his face in his hands. “We didn’t get the loan.”
“What loan?” Julia was baffled. They hadn’t sought any loan, none that she knew about. “Is that why you’ve been obsessively checking your phone? Were you waiting to hear from a bank? What on earth did you apply for? What kind of shit mess did you get us in?” Her anger was rising again.
“They said it was guaranteed. I was preapproved. That’s exactly what he told me. Pre… a… proved. What else does that mean?” He reached for the bottle, no longer there, and then tried to drink from the glass he’d already emptied.
Julia felt like she might explode. “Christian, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you’re really frightening me.”
When he met her eyes, they were filled with tears. But dammit, she knew he was crying for himself. Shame radiated off him. He turned away from her because he couldn’t bear the indignity, and that gesture alone told her all she needed to know. The news was bad. Really bad.
“I’ve lost it all,” he blurted out. “I thought I had it under control, Jules, I really did. One more loan, that’s all I needed… ThenI could have shuffled the money around until business picked up. I was right there. I had it all figured out. Fuck!” He slammed his fist against the table, then grimaced, swallowing hard as if he’d downed another burning shot of whiskey. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Of all the words that drunkenly spilled from his mouth, Julia focused on the three most important ones.
“What do you mean,lost it all?” Mounting pressure in her chest painfully squeezed at her heart. Unable to breathe, she felt her whole world caving in. It was like being buried under a crush of bodies, a mishmash of all the creditors who’d been hounding her for months.
It had been Julia’s greatest fear—that Christian would move so fast and recklessly that her hard-charging husband would forget when to apply the brakes. His explanations and excuses wouldn’t matter. The final result would still be the same: the twisted wreckage of their lives would be scattered about, and the black box that held all of Christian’s horrible choices would reveal precisely how he’d brought them down.
Lost it all.
“The loan was supposed to pay off the line of credit. I maxed it out, but now I’ve defaulted.”
“Christian, what line of credit? I don’t understand.” God, talking to a drunk was like trying to follow a bouncing ball.
“The HELOC,” he finally spit out.
HELOC. Got it. Home equity line of credit. Making progress. But this made no sense. Christian couldn’t get one of those without her signing it too, since her name was also on the deed to the house.
As that thought came to her, another struck, this one so unsettling that Julia nearly had an out-of-body experience. She envisioned herself strangling her husband, her hands wrapped tightly around his throat, squeezing the life out of him.
Their primary residence was available for a line of credit only with her authorization, but the lake house was held in a trust, along with other cash assets, and Christian was the trustee. They’d set it up that way because they’d lumped an inheritance from Christian’s family with her assets to safeguard these resources for Taylor downthe road. At the time, picking Christian as the trustee had seemed like the most sensible choice. He was the finance guy.
A wave of nausea rose. “Christian, what about the money? We had money in that trust.”
“Long gone,” he said.
