Ruined By My Brother's Best Friend novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Rule

Freddie came home at six with a bag of chips and no idea.

I was waiting at the top of the stairs.

"Sokolov Holdings," I said. "Monday."

He stopped dead.

The chip bag crackled in his fist.

"Who told you?"

"Your new boss. In front of four of his staff. While he tore up a cheque he'd tried to pay me with."

Behind me in the kitchen, Mum put down the kettle.

Freddie came up the last steps slowly.

"I signed in March," he said. "Before I knew anything about the parade. I swear on Dad."

"Why?"

He looked past me at Mum.

"Because I found the letters, Mum. In your drawer. At Easter."

Mum went very still.

"Thirty-eight thousand pounds," Freddie said. "To the bank. Since Dad died. You've been paying the interest out of the till for six years and you never said a word."

I turned and looked at my mother.

She took her glasses off her head and folded them, and folded them again.

"Your dad left it," she said. "New ovens and the roof. He thought he had time."

"Mum."

"You were fifteen, Hollie. Freddie was seventeen. What was I supposed to say?"

Nobody answered that.

Freddie put the chips on the table like an apology.

"Seventy grand a year," he said. "I'd have it cleared in three. That's all it was. I didn't know he owned us."

"He does now," I said.

Lev was on the green sofa in the front room, where Mum had told him to stay out of the way.

At half seven he went out to the cashpoint on Deptford High Street.

He came back with nothing.

"Cancelled," he said, and put three dead bank cards on the kitchen table one after another, like a losing hand. "All of them. And the flat. My key doesn't work on the building app."

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