She looks at me, her eyes still glossy and her expression something like stoic.

“Get the scotch out of that cabinet. Top shelf.” She doesn’t say please and I feel like that’s part of what she needs right now, too, so I just stand up and do it. I grab two glasses without her asking, then place them down and pour.

“Why did you really get fired? For real?” Her mouth trembles, but her hand is steady when she raises the cigarette again. “I know you weren’t telling me the whole truth. I’m used to accepting half-truths from men. But right now, with all of this mess going on, I need to know.”

I purse my lips and exhale hard through my nose, take the gulp of booze she didn’t.

Then I tell her the truth.

“They caught me trying to steal,” I say. “Because I got greedy. It wasn’t enough that I’d grifted a position people bust their asses for years to get. It didn’t matter that I was making more semihonest money than anyone in my family had ever made through any means, dishonest or otherwise. Once I had a little, I thought, ‘I can get more. And I’m gonna take it.’ Typical, if I’ve learned anything from you the last few days.”

“Completely typical. Except you were stupid enough to get caught.” She giggles and I wonder if she wasn’t already drinking before I got here.

“So you should know that my name isn’t Theodore, like you told Candace,” I say. “Well, it is. In Russian. Fyodor. Named after my dad, who was tangled up with stuff considerably more dangerous than white-collar crime. I went to live with him after I got into some trouble and had to drop out of high school, lay low. I worked construction with him, but also got tangled up with the stuff he was tangled up with. I guess this thing with Kim was my way of going straight.”

Sydney looks at me with wide eyes, the ash building up on the end of her cigarette. “Mafia?”

“Something like that, but a million times less interesting than the movies. I got out before I moved to New York, so I don’t know, maybe this is where all the cool mafia stuff happens.” People glamorize it, but it’d been just another job with no insurance and a low life expectancy when it came down to it. “Anyway, here I was at this fancy office. And I wasn’t stupid or anything. I fit in fine, and I started small. There was a group in my department who always wanted cocaine. And I told them I could get it for them. I’d take their money, buy a little of the good stuff, a little of the not-so-good stuff, and a little of the probably bad stuff. I made a profit, the cokeheads were just happy to have some coke, and all was well and good.”

“Wow. And here I was thinking you were just a regular degular dude, but Fyodor was trappin’ at the office.” She snort-laughs a cloud of smoke.

“Yup. And eventually, I realized that I had access to all these people’s bank account information. And maybe I could make some transfers.”

“Theo!” She slaps the table, eyes wide in disbelief. “You didn’t.”

“I did. Kim wanted this house and kept saying it was fine if she had to pay for everything, which made me feel like I had to contribute because, I don’t know, toxic masculinity? In retrospect I should have just let her be my sugar mama instead of committing multiple elaborate and unsustainable crimes to get out of a life of committing small sustainable crimes. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, I guess.”

Sydney laughs, sharply, abruptly, and I’m surprised to find that I can join her.

“All this to impress some woman who cheated on your ass anyway. I feel that.” She takes a gulp this time when she raises her glass.

“Yes and no. Part of it was that all that money was sitting there and I knew, intimately, how little work most of these people did to earn it. Kim’s family are the most miserly people ever, and the accounts were held by so many people just like them. Everything was about helping them cheat to get more money, to not pay employees who were owed money, to avoid taxes, and to hoard it because they didn’t ever want to spend what they had.”

I grit my teeth and look at her, expecting to see judgment, but her expression hasn’t changed much.

“You got caught,” she says.

“I triggered some internal system before any transfer went through. Then they started looking into my background. Fired me without prosecuting because they didn’t want to make the company look bad, but my name was blacklisted within the company, with our partners, within the industry’s whisper network.”

“And Kim?”

“Didn’t know. Was understanding at first, when she thought I got downsized, but couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just get another great job. She thought I was lazy but apparently never realized I was just a bad liar and a criminal. The former is worse than the latter in her world.”

Sydney drains the last of her drink and thumps at her chest.

“My turn.”

I’d expected more of a reaction, but she seems unfazed by my confession. She grabs the bottle, pours some more scotch for herself, and then tops me off.

“I was married, like I told you. Mommy never liked Marcus. Told me he had the fingernails of a cheater and a forehead like a billboard. I didn’t listen, of course. He was from a nice family and said all the right things. When we had to move to Seattle for his first job out of grad school, Mommy hated him even more but wished the best for me.”

“Did he hit you?” I ask, because I need to prepare myself for that particular kind of rage.

“No. He never hit me. Just . . . I never could do anything right once we got there. I couldn’t find a job because the market sucked.” She raises her glass to me and I raise mine in return. “And his job was so stressful, some kind of start-up that he never wanted to talk about because ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ It started with dinner. Suddenly my food was too spicy or too salty or not healthy enough. Then I wasn’t cleaning the house well enough. Then I wasn’t well-informed enough and he didn’t want to bring me around his colleagues in case I embarrassed him . . .”

She laughs bitterly. “And then, ‘Hey, you’ve gained some weight.’ ‘No, I would never cheat, stop being paranoid.’ And then, ‘Maybe I did cheat but you’re crazy, we should have you committed.’”

“Jesus, Sydney. You didn’t deserve that. You know that, right?”

She gives me a jerky nod.

“Seriously. You’re beautiful, you’re interesting, and even if he didn’t think so there was no reason for him to treat you badly.”

She exhales deeply.

“Thanks. It all feels so silly now compared to everything else. While that was going on, Mommy started having some health problems. She couldn’t work as much. Started falling behind in the water bill payments, the taxes, and she didn’t want to bother me with any of it. I told her everything was fine, and she told me everything was fine, and guess what?”

“Nothing was fine,” I volunteer.

She nods. “One day she gets a call saying that she’s in danger of losing the house because she’s racked up back taxes. This person is calling from a program to help people get their debt in control and make sure they don’t lose their homes. She doesn’t want to bother me because she knows I’m not doing well, so she doesn’t even mention it. She doesn’t tell me anything! She just agrees to their terms and conditions because she wants to make sure she doesn’t lose the house, my inheritance. Who does that?”

A tear starts to slip down her cheek and she brushes it away hard. “Then whaddaya know, a year later her debt has ballooned. The company that was supposed to have prevented this doesn’t know how this happened but they can help. They’re willing to pay off her debt for her. All she has to do is sign the house over to them and the debt will go away. She can stay in the house until . . . until she dies. It’ll be just like the debt never happened. They’ll even give her some money. At that point, she knew things with Marcus were bad. She knew if she could get some money for me, maybe I would leave him. The house wouldn’t get passed down in the family like she’d dreamed, but she wouldn’t have to worry about me paying off her debt because someone else had taken it. And I’d still have someplace to come back to. Sounds legit, right?”

Her eyes are so filled with hurt, a hurt I understand completely—the pain of grabbing a proverbial hot doorknob, pulling the door open, and not being able to let go as your mother’s bad decisions flambé you in their backdraft.

“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what to do, so I gently pry away the cigarette that’s burned down to the filter and put it in the ashtray before holding her hand.

“I came back after the divorce and she didn’t tell me anything then, either.” Her voice is hoarse, breaking every word so I have to lean in to understand her. “She didn’t tell me anything until she got sick, and then she only told me because she realized how they’d fooled her, stolen all her hard work from her so that it added up to less than nothing. She got mad then, and told me, ‘Don’t you let them take my house. Our house. No matter what happens to me.’”