Utterly Forgettable | MM Romance | Complete

Four: What Will It Be? (2/2)

Surveying the options on the counter, Emery looked deeply disappointed. "Milk and cereal? I thought the one good thing that would come of this insistence on breakfast would be your coffee."

"I know you love my coffee. I also know it's not wise to give coffee to someone who can't reliably answer the question of when they last ate. I'm not drinking any either in solidarity, which is the best you'll get. Now eat your cereal."

"I'm not a child."

Josh found the idea of Emery having been born an adult likelier than the one of him ever having been a child. "No, a child would be less stubborn. Eat the damn cereal unless you'd prefer the rest of last night's soup for breakfast."

Emery sneered but started eating, a small mercy in and of itself.

"Anyway," Josh continued, "what were you saying about Roger?"

"Roger, yes. He thought I'd return in a few weeks; a month, perhaps. I was away for almost a year. Some clients left us — it's understandable; if they wanted their money to stay put they might as well have stashed it under the mattress. Roger had his own money heavily invested in the firm as well, as did I, and my absence unnerved him. One day it made him reckless enough to try his hand at investing it himself, on a small scale."

Emery played with his spoon, watching milk ebb and flow from one side of the bowl to the other as if nothing were quite as interesting, putting distance between himself and his retelling by that act alone. "If he'd lost money then, everything would have worked out, but his luck was our downfall. He saw some returns and risked more and more — I studied the entire train wreck for my trial — until he found what he must have thought was a sure thing. That's why you shouldn't invest if you don't know what you're doing — I could have told him it was far from a sure thing; I could have seen the potential risks coming a mile away. But he couldn't, and he invested client money alongside his own. And lost. A great deal."

Josh couldn't eat his own breakfast, enthralled by the contrast between Emery's distant voice and the look of sharp regret in his eyes.

"I still might have saved the company if he'd come to me — it'd take admitting to clients what had happened, asking for permission to invest the rest over a period of two or three years, but I could have balanced it. But he knew I'd have made him take responsibility. He knew I'd have turned him in. So, instead he panicked. He took the rest of the money and vanished. He left nothing behind, not even in the accounts of our most vulnerable clients — he just took everything and ran."

Something Emma had told him suddenly clicked in Josh's mind. "And you had your silly romantic ideals."

Emery's head snapped up. "I'm sorry?"

"That's something Emma once said, when I assumed she had as much money as you did. That she'd pulled her share of the money from the company long ago because she didn't need to be a millionaire, and you had your silly romantic ideals. That even the house was tied to the company and what she had was enough to take care of both of you if something happened that made you realize you couldn't control everything. That's what her money was for."

Emery closed his eyes for a moment, his face a mask of grief. When he opened them again he'd gotten his emotions back under control. "I believe she feared recession more than she did Roger but yes, I can imagine her saying that. They weren't silly romantic ideals — I had absolute faith in every decision I made. If I weren't prepared to take the same risks as my clients, how could I ask them to trust me with their lives' savings?"

This. This was why it was so hard to dismiss Emery as just a stubborn hedgehog, this was why people waited in line for him to take their money and make it grow. This integrity, the strength of his character, how he'd never ask anyone to do anything he wouldn't do himself. And this was why it was so very hard for Josh to forget him, in spite of... The rest. In spite of the rest. "Was Roger's house tied up in it too?"