"Why did you have to wait until Marguerite was pregnant?" I ask. "Because when you're together for as long as we have been, things get hard, challenging, you know? Boring. She's working all the time, or she was until she got pregnant, and I work even more. We're tired, exhausted. All we do is talk about work. Nothing else seems to be as interesting or stimulating. You know how boring it is to talk about money?"
"That's what you do for a living," I say, "and that's what I do for a living."
"Yeah, I know. I'll repeat my question," he challenges me. "Do you know how boring it is to only talk about money?"
"No, I don't," I say. "I have my own money problems though. And, I don't know. You shouldn't have lied to me."
"I saw your face," Lincoln says. "That was the last thing you wanted to hear. You wanted me to lie to you. You wanted me to be this perfect husband and soon-to-be father, when in reality, who knows? Maybe I'm a lot more like our dad than you would like me to believe."
"Fuck you," I say, pointing my finger in his face. "Fuck you. You take that back. You're nothing like him. He's a loser and a drunk."
"Yeah, well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.” Lincoln shrugs.
He turns to the sink, turns on the faucet, grabs a rag and starts to wash off the blood from his nose.
The fact that he even mentioned our father makes my whole body tense up. I don't know why I'm so invested in my brother and his personal life.
I'm really not, not forever, but connecting with Marguerite and actually the both of them over those last few months really made me have a lot more sympathy and empathy for her.
Besides, I thought that maybe I actually, or perhaps I just always thought that they were such a great couple, that I didn't want to see anything that would stand in that way.
I leave the bathroom and sit down on the edge of the bed. By some miracle, no one heard us fight. It's still clear by our faces that something happened, but at least now we can come up with some sort of story to make it seem plausible.
"What kind of trouble are you in?" Lincoln comes out of the bathroom and stands in the doorway. His face is getting puffy, and he needs to apply some ice. So do I.
"I don't know if you heard, but Mom found out that I took that $200,000 from my trust."
"You what?" He looks genuinely surprised.
I furrow my brow, uncertain if I can believe him. "You know. Marguerite told you, right?"
"Told me what?" he asks, taking a step closer.
"I thought that she told you, but I guess she didn't."
He looks at me with blank eyes, and I fill him in on paying for Jacqueline's mother's treatment.
"You have to promise me not to tell Mom," I say. "She knows that I borrowed the money, but I think she suspects that I'm gambling or something like that. I just don't want her to know. She likes Jacqueline, and I want to keep it that way."
"Wow. So you just paid all that money and you didn't even really know her?"
I think back to my obsession with Jacqueline. It's kind of hard to explain, and I don't even bother.
Besides, there's a secret that I'm keeping that I can't very well tell him either.
For now it seems good to just appear to be this totally chivalrous man willing help an almost complete stranger.
"Yeah. We went out a few times. We had fun, and she mentioned that her mom was going through that, so I looked it up and just paid the bill."
"Oh my God. That's crazy."
"Yeah, I know. It was a secret. She got mad at me when she found out."
"Wait, so you didn't even tell her? You didn't even capitalize on this generous gift?"
"No, I didn't want her to know. I just wanted to help her out."
"Wow. Man, you and I are very different," Lincoln says, shaking his head.
I don't know where to take the conversation with me here, but Lincoln does. I tell him about Mom’s threats if the money is not returned.
"Wow. That's harsh," he says.
"Yeah, it is."
"So where do I come in?" Lincoln takes a step away from me.
"I'm trying to figure it out with my work."
"There's no way you can do enough work or get enough clients in any legitimate way anyway, in such a short amount of time."
"I was waiting for a startup to come through with the sale, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen now. At least not for another couple of weeks."
"Listen, you need my help, just tell me."
"Tell you what?" I ask, looking up at him.
Our eyes meet. He gives me a little wink.
I know what he wants.
The problem is that I can't give it to him.
"Just ask."
"Well, is it a problem?"
"It's not a problem if you ask," Lincoln says, crossing his arms across his chest.
I wait and swallow hard. "Can I borrow the money?"
"Yes, but I'll need something in return," he adds quickly.
I clench my jaw. I know what he means: not the details, but the general gist.
"This isn't the kind of work that I do anymore," I say after a long pause.
He narrows his eyes. "You're very good at it. I don't know why you'd stop."
"Because it's illegal. Because it could give me years behind bars. Do you need more reasons than that?"
"I noticed that you didn't mention that you don't want to."
"Look, of course, I don't want to. That's why I stopped doing that in the first place. And that's why I'm making money the legitimate way now."
"Yeah, but do you ever think about it? The past, all the fun that we had? It's not finance."
"There is monetary exchange, wouldn't you say?" I challenge him.
"Yeah, it's a little more fun than it was, right? It's a little more fun than just pushing papers around, analyzing stock, analyzing the quality of someone's investments, predicting whether or not they make money."
"I do quite well now," I insist.
"Listen, if you can't do this for me, I can't lend you the $200,000,” Lincoln says definitively.
"More like $350,000," I admit. "I don't just owe money to Mom. I borrowed a portion from some bad guys.”
"Bad guys? Now who's being cryptic?" Lincoln sits down on the edge of the bed. "What exactly are you up to?"
"Look, I told you I don't do that anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't have contacts, you know? I knew that I needed to borrow this money, and I did. So what?"
"So what? Well, let's just say you can pretend like everything you do right now is on the up and up, but we all know the world that our father created and where that money in the trust fund came from.”
I sigh.
"Mom would like to pretend that it's all clean, that it's all from investments, but you and I know the truth,” he continues. “You know exactly how much of that money is dirty and bloody."
"That's why I tried to do something good," I admit. "That's why I reached out and helped Jacqueline. After all of that stuff that we did, I had to make it right."