By day seven, Kai had cancelled their New Year’s plans. He did not break up with Darla in a conversation. He stopped answering.
Three texts from Darla, each one longer than the last.
The first, “can we talk?”
The second, “Kai, I know it looks bad, but I can explain.”
The third, “please just call me back.”
He did not respond to any of them.
By day 14, his apartment key was on Darla’s nightstand, returned in a small padded envelope with no note.
In Kai’s apartment on day seven, the conversation that ended it was short.
Darla had come over thinking she could explain the way she had explained everything else in her life with confidence and charm and the assumption that the person listening would eventually agree because she was Darla and people agreed with Darla.
She sat on his couch with her jacket still on, legs crossed, phone in her lap, ready to talk her way through it.
“You told me this was your family’s cabin,” Kai said from the kitchen doorway.
“It is family. Sheay is my sister.”
“Your sister’s name is on the deed. She bought it with her own money. She renovated it with her own hands for eight months. You sold tickets to her house. You charged $6,000 to her credit card.”
“I was going to pay her back.”
“With what? You owe 60 people their $40 back and you have $600 in your account. You were never going to pay her back. You were going to let it ride until the statement came and then you were going to say it was a misunderstanding.”
Darla pulled at a thread on her jacket sleeve.
“Your dad knew,” Kai said. “That is in the text. Dad said she won’t check. He was in on it. Both of you were.”
“It is not fraud, Kai. It is family.”
“Those are not the same thing, Darla. And the fact that you keep saying they are is the reason I am not going to be here for New Year’s.”
He canled their plans that night.
By day 10, the weight had settled into Walt’s kitchen.
The demand letter sat on the counter beside the toaster, still in its envelope, because opening it again meant reading the numbers again.
$7,000.
Horton had calculated the usage fees at $200 per weekend for six weekends.
Clean, simple, defensible.
Walt sat at the kitchen table with his phone open to his bank app.
Checking balance 2340.
He pulled an envelope from the junk drawer and wrote the numbers on the back.
Demand letter $7,000.
Checking $2340.
Darla’s refund obligation $1,600 because she had collected $2,400 from 60 guests and already spent $800 on decorations she could not return.
The guests wanted their money back.
Darla had $600 left in her account. She had texted Walt four times asking him to help cover the difference.
Walt’s salary was $54,000 a year. After taxes, after the mortgage, after utilities, after Irene’s car payment, after groceries, he had about $400 a month that was not spoken for.
The demand letter alone would take 17 months to pay at that rate. And that assumed he did not eat, did not drive, did not heat the house, did not buy a single thing that was not already budgeted.
Darla’s refund problem was separate, but connected.
The guests wanted their $40 back. Darla had 60 people in her phone who had paid for a party that did not happen. and the refund texts were coming in at a rate of four or five a day.
She had sent Walt three texts asking him to help cover the difference.
He had not responded to any of them because he did not have the money to respond with.
He closed the banking app.
He opened the calculator.