Page 51 of Sunset Cove
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.
Chip shifted in his chair, leaning forward. “You made a joke last night about me crashing the economy.”
“That wasn’t serious!” Claire needed to be careful about what she said to him.
He shook his head. “No, I know. But I’m not entirely innocent.”
“Chip –”
He continued. “I worked at an investment bank. I’d been there for seventeen years, and I knew what they were doing.”
Claire frowned. She never fully understood the economic crash. All she knew was the little pension she’d hoped to one day receive had been wiped out. She’d chalked it up to bad luck.
“I’m embarrassed to admit this,” she said, “but I don’t even know what caused the crash. Wasn’t it people buying homes they couldn’t afford?”
Sort of like what Claire was doing now, except it was a hotel and not a home. Her stomach sank at the thought.
“No, that wasn’t it.” Chip shifted again. It looked like he was in pain. “It was easy to put the blame on the average person, but that wasn’t it at all. The banks – they knew what they were doing. They preyed on people. There were teams trained to do this, to find someone who was in the market for a house and sell them a mortgage they couldn’t afford.”
This still sounded a bit too much like what Claire had done with the hotel. “They shouldn’t have gotten those homes, though, right?”
“It wasn’t the home they couldn’t afford. The banks sold them a mortgage with a low interest rate, and everything looked fine. They’d sign, they’d make their payments, and then in a year or two, the interest rate would climb and climb until they couldn’t keep up.”
Claire frowned. She thought she’d gotten a fixed rate for the hotel, but what if she hadn’t? The room was starting to feel hot.
He was speaking quickly now. “They hid that from people. They didn’t care that people would lose their homes. That was the point. They wanted to take as much money from them as they could, as fast as they could.”
Claire shrugged. “That’s what banks do, isn’t it?”
“That’s the thing. The banks weren’t happy just ruining those lives. They then said, ‘Hey look at these great mortgages we have, you can sink your retirement money into these, it’s a great, safe investment.’ They sold them off to pension funds and 401ks, even though theyknewthe home owners weren’t going to be able to keep making payments. They knew it would all fall apart, and the pensions would lose everything, and the home owners would lose everything, and they did it anyway.”
“Wow. I didn’t know that.” Claire sat for a moment. “That’s...much worse than I realized.”
“Exactly.” He nodded. “I worked at that bank for seventeen years, and though I didn’t work on one of those teams, I started to hear things. I started to see things.”
Claire wanted to reach across the table and give him a hug. He looked tortured. “It’s okay, Chip. It’s not like you came up with it.”
He flinched. “That’s nice of you to say, but it’s not okay. I could’ve looked into it. I could’ve figured out what was going on. I could’ve done something about it, even if it didn’t stop it, I could’vetried.”
“Well, I’m sorry that you couldn’t prevent the world financial crash of 2008,” Claire said with a laugh. “Maybe next time?”
He laughed, too. “I know I might’ve made no difference. It’s just the fact that…” He trailed off.
She waited for him to finish.
He spoke again. “It’s the fact that I didn’t care. I knew something was off, but I figured so what, we’re all making money, that’s what matters.”
“Ah, I understand.”
“It was all for nothing, too.” Chip stared at her. “I lost my retirement. I lost my job. I lost my wife – not because of the crash, but because of how I was, for far too long, just interested in chasing the next dollar.”
Claire smiled. “So now we need to spend four hundred thousand dollars on the bathrooms?”
He laughed, heartily. “No, of course not. I just don’t make all of my decisions because of money anymore. When something is wrong, I speak up. Maybe too much. For that, I’m sorry.”
It didn’t seem like too much to Claire. It seemed like a lesson hard learned. She leaned forward and let out a breath. “Don’t be sorry. I like working with you. I like that you’re honest. I...like you. I trust you.”
He smiled. “I trust you too.”
At that moment, the fax machine behind Chip sprung to life. Claire watched as it noisily printed a sheet of paper with Marty’s face prominently displayed at the top.
