My brother put his glass on the table.
“What?”
My mother closed her eyes.
My father read it again.
“It says here the collateral is this house.”
Sebastian stepped closer.
“Let me see.”
“Don’t touch anything.”
Dad raised a hand.
He never spoke to him like that.
Sebastian stopped.
My mother seemed to have aged ten years in thirty seconds.
“Arthur, I was going to explain it to you.”
“When?”
“When the time was right.”
“Three years wasn’t enough time?”
She took a deep breath.
“It was for Sebastian’s business.”
My brother opened his mouth.
“What business?”
Dad looked at him.
“That’s exactly what I want to know.”
Mom put a hand to her chest.
“When the sneaker thing went wrong, he ended up owing a lot of money.”
“How much?”
No one answered.
“Rebecca.”
“Almost forty thousand.”
Sebastian let out a nervous laugh.
“No, no, no. That’s not true.”
My mother looked at him.
“Yes, it is.”
“I owed like ten.”
“That was what you knew.”
Now it was he who turned pale.
Dad dropped the folder on the table.
“You mortgaged our house to pay off Sebastian’s debts?”
“I had no choice.”
“Of course you had a choice!”
“They were going to sue him!”
“Then you should have told me.”
“You would have destroyed him.”
My father pointed at my brother.
“He was an adult!”
Sebastian stepped back.
“Keep me out of this.”
I looked at him.
“You’ve been in it since page one.”
He glared at me.
“You shut up.”
My father slammed the table.
“Nobody tells her to shut up!”
That was new.
So new that even I froze.
My mother started to cry.
“I thought I could solve it.”
“How?”
“With Chloe’s money.”
That sentence landed worse than the previous one.
My father looked at me.
“What money?”
I opened my purse.
I pulled out another envelope.
“The money Mom asked me for every month.”
My mother shook her head.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Thirty-six payments, Mom.”
“Because I needed to maintain the house.”
“You told me it was for utilities, medication, taxes.”
Dad opened the envelope.
There were printed text messages.
Not all of them.
Just some.
“Honey, I need a thousand before Friday this month.”
“Please don’t tell your dad, he’s very stressed.”
“If he finds out he’ll feel useless.”
“It’s temporary.”
“Your brother shouldn’t know either.”
Dad read in silence.
Sebastian stepped closer.
“You were giving a thousand a month?”
“Sometimes more.”
His expression changed.
Not to guilt.
To disbelief.
“And you made that much with your little posts?”
I looked at him.
“Yes.”
For the first time, he stopped smiling.
Dad flipped to another page.
“There’s a payment here for eighteen hundred.”
“That month Mom said there was a penalty fee.”
“There was,” she replied quickly.
My father picked up the mortgage statement.
“Yes. Because you were two payments behind.”
My mother lowered her head.
Then I understood something.
“Behind?”
Dad looked up.
“You deposited the money on time.”
“Always.”
I looked at Mom.
“Then why were there late payments?”
She didn’t answer.
Sebastian did.
“Because she was probably paying for other things too.”
The silence returned.
We all looked at him.
My brother threw his hands up.
“What?”
My mother started crying harder.
Dad spoke very slowly.
“What other things, Rebecca?”
She sat down.
“The car.”
My father closed his eyes.
“Which car?”
No one needed to ask.
We all looked out the window.
Sebastian’s new vehicle was parked outside.
The one supposedly my father had given him.
Dad opened his eyes.
“I paid the down payment.”
“Yes.”
“You told me your sister lent us the rest.”
“Yes.”
“What did you pay the monthly installments with?”
My mother didn’t speak.
I understood.
I had paid those too.
Without knowing it.
Sebastian reacted first.
“Look, that has nothing to do with me. Mom managed the money.”
I laughed.
I couldn’t help it.
“Right.”
“What’s so funny?”
“That ten minutes ago you were mocking me because I didn’t know how much it cost to live in the real world.”
“Don’t start.”
“Your car, Sebastian.”
I pointed outside.
“Part of your car came from my fake job.”
He turned red.
“I didn’t ask you for anything.”
“Exactly. You never had to ask.”
Mom did it for you.
Dad grabbed a chair and sat down slowly.
He looked defeated.
“How much do we owe?”
My mother took a while to answer.
“Fifty-seven thousand.”
Dad froze.
“That’s impossible.”
“There were refinancings.”
“Refinancings?”
“And fees.”
“What fees?”
“Notaries. Interest. Commissions.”
My father looked back at the first page.
“There’s a second loan listed here.”
My mother stopped breathing.
“Is there another one?”
“Arthur…”
“IS THERE ANOTHER ONE?”
“Yes.”
Sebastian started pacing back and forth.
“This can’t be happening.”
My father pointed at him.
“You sit down.”
