“Not bad, V,” he said. “A little cold, but I can fix that.”
I told all three of them to leave. I told them this was a commercial vessel and that they were on it without permission. I told them they had five minutes before I contacted the harbor authority.
My father poured more of my scotch and stepped closer to me.
He began talking about everything the family had given me. The meals. The roof. The years of raising me. He said that when one member of a family succeeds, the whole family benefits. He said they had invested in me, and that now they needed something back.
I had heard variations of this argument my entire life.
But hearing it spoken aloud, calmly, in my own salon, made something settle into clarity inside me.
To my parents, my childhood had never been a gift. It had been an investment. Every meal they had provided, every school year they had funded, every year of shelter had been entered into an invisible ledger. And now that the ledger had matured, they were here to collect.
Then my father told me the amount.
One hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars.
James had borrowed from a private lender to fund a speculative investment that had not gone the way he planned. The lender had stopped sending letters and started sending something considerably more unsettling.
“Consider it back payment,” my father said, almost pleasantly. “With interest and inflation, what you owe the family comes to about the same. We’re just balancing the books.”
He sounded as if he had rehearsed the line.
I stood very still.
Then I told them I needed to check my accounts and would return in two hours.
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