Who Knows You by Heart by C. J. Farley

Author:C. J. Farley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2025-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Hours later you are still processing your meeting with Blue. You have to quit. You’ve got a degree from Columbia. You’re an incredible coder and engineer. The economy isn’t great, but there has to be another job out there. You’ve always thought of yourself as a good person. Blue just demonstrated how a good—or at least good-adjacent—person should act in this situation. If he could quit, why can’t you? Well, he did have another job lined up, and you don’t. And he did just cash in his RSUs; it’s October, and yours won’t vest until November, which is forever away. There has to be a way out of this, a solution, a compromise, a rationalization. Maybe you could switch teams, get another assignment. Maybe you could work from the inside to change what the company is doing. Maybe you could just work there a few more months, a year at most, five years tops, to bank enough money to go off and live your life. But you have to quit. No argument about it, you have to give your notice.

On your way home, you get an email from $uits, your lawyer. There’s no message, just an invoice. When you open the attachment and see the size of the bill, you nearly choke. The minute you emerge from the subway, you call your lawyer from the street.

“This bill is way larger than we discussed,” you say.

“Your mom’s bank is drawing out the case,” $uits says.

“I’m trying to settle a debt. I’m not trying to add to it.”

“This is not my doing. The bank’s got lawyers who are filing nonsense motions, billing lots of hours. I had to reply to each one of those motions, and more motions means more money.”

“I already paid you a huge retainer.”

“And that’s been exhausted. This is all new work you are paying for.”

Your lawyer walks you through the particulars like you don’t already know all this. A couple years before she passed, and without telling you anything about it, your mom took out a reverse mortgage. You had seen those things pitched on TV by poorly toupeed ex-stars of long-since-canceled police procedurals, but you never thought anyone you knew would actually fall for it. A reverse mortgage allows a homeowner to take out a huge loan against the value of their house, which, to your mom, probably seemed like a good plan at first. Your mom had owned her apartment outright—it had been paid for by your dad’s life insurance. But now that your mom was gone, your bank was calling in the loan that she had taken out. When you first saw how much was owed, you started to laugh, because the figure was so large it was clearly unpayable—it was the size of the goddamn national debt. When $uits explained that you were on the hook for it, you stopped laughing. Something no longer being funny is one of the worst feelings in the world—it stops every other positive emotion from happening.

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