Chapter 7 - The Spill
By Friday, the silence had transformed into a wildfire.
I don’t know who broke first. Maybe it was someone at the hospital who overheard Natalie and me arguing in the waiting room. Maybe it was Mike’s guys at the landscaping yard. Or maybe it was Greg, Natalie's deadbeat ex-husband, who had sniffed out the word *millions* like a shark catching blood in the tide.
My phone didn't stop ringing.
First came the calls from unknown numbers. Then came the emails: distant cousins from Ohio I hadn't seen since childhood, high school acquaintances asking about "startup investments," and a barrage of messages on my social media accounts.
*Hey Jess! Heard about your crazy good news! Would love to catch up over coffee!*
*Jessie, it's Uncle Frank. Your cousin Tommy needs knee surgery, give me a call ASAP.*
*Must be nice sitting on twenty mil while the rest of us starve, bitch.*
I had to shut off my phone. But the fortress was already compromised.
At 3:00 PM, a sharp knock rattled my front door. When I looked through the peephole, I saw Amy—my cousin who was working two jobs while attending nursing school.
I unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open.
Amy didn't look like the rest of the opportunists flooding my inbox. She looked wrecked. She stood on my porch holding a thick stack of spiral-bound nursing textbooks.
"Is it true?" she asked, her lip quivering.
"Amy—"
"I worked forty-eight hours last weekend at the diner, Jess," Amy said, her voice shaking with righteous fury. "I had to skip two clinical rotations because my car battery died and I couldn't afford eighty bucks for a replacement. I came to your house crying, begging for a loan. You made me write a budget on a piece of paper, and then you gave me nine hundred dollars and told me I needed to learn financial discipline!"
"I wanted you to finish school without relying on handouts!" I pleaded, tears burning my eyes. "I wanted you to build resilience!"
"Resilience?" Amy screamed, throwing the two-hundred-dollar pathophysiology textbook straight at my chest. It struck my collarbone and clattered heavily to the floor. "You bought yourself a half-million-dollar townhouse in cash! You have offshore accounts! And you sat there lecturing me about cutting coupons while my teeth were chattering in a car that wouldn't start!"
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"Amy, please, let me pay off your tuition. All of it. Right now."
"Go to hell, Jess," she spat, turning around and sprinting down the walkway to her rusted Civic. "Don't you dare write a check for me. Don't you dare make me part of your sick little game."
