Chapter 2 - THE LOAN MEGAN NEVER REQUESTED
Megan told the doorman not to send the visitor upstairs.
Ryan reached for the wall panel. She stepped between him and it.
“Don’t.”
“Megan, it’s not what you think.”
“You don’t know what I think because you haven’t told me anything.”
Linda pulled her wrist from Ryan’s hand. “Tell her. She’s already ruined the floor staging.”
Megan looked at the mud, the bucket, then the suitcases.
“Staging?”
Ryan closed his eyes for half a second.
Linda’s confidence weakened. “You said she knew.”
“I said I’d handle it.”
“You said she’d sign today.”
Megan’s cheek throbbed. “Sign what?”
Ryan asked Linda to wait in the guest room. Linda refused. He asked Megan to lower her voice. She laughed once, without humor.
“You brought a lender to my building and your mother came prepared to move in. My voice is not the problem.”
Ryan finally admitted he had started an application for a renovation loan against the condo. He called it a temporary measure, a bridge until an investment matured. He said no money could be released without Megan’s signature.
“So why didn’t you ask me?”
“I was going to.”
“At noon?”
Linda dropped onto the arm of the sofa. “You told me the refinance would replace my hundred eighty thousand.”
Megan looked at her. “What hundred eighty thousand?”
The color drained from Linda’s face more slowly than it had from Ryan’s.
Ryan moved toward Megan. “We should talk privately.”
“No,” Megan said. “We’re finally talking in front of everyone who apparently owns part of my life.”
Linda said she had liquidated most of her retirement brokerage account six months earlier. Ryan had told her Megan needed capital for a major renovation and that the condo’s value would rise enough to repay the loan after their wedding.
Megan had renovated nothing. The only construction in the condo had been a bathroom tile repair that cost thirty-eight hundred dollars.
Ryan insisted Linda had misunderstood.
Linda stared at him. “You showed me the budget.”
Megan went to the small desk near the windows where she and Ryan kept household papers. The wedding account statement was missing from its usual folder.
She opened the banking app on her laptop instead.
Their joint wedding account had received forty-two thousand dollars four months earlier from a company called Harbor Ridge Holdings. Two days later, Ryan had paid the venue, photographer, caterer, and band.
Megan had believed the money came from the annual bonus Ryan claimed he had earned.
She looked up from the screen.
May you like
“Is Harbor Ridge my renovation?”
Ryan’s silence answered before he did.
