Page 33 of Devil

The horror, when it comes, doesn’t come because of the horrible thing he’s proposing.

It comes because I already know I can’t say no.

The horror is turned back on me like a knife because I already knewhehad a badness inside him, but it turns out that I have a badness too. A weakness. A despair, even though despair is a sin, because my ability to hope has withered like Jonah’s gourd. It’s bled out from between my ribs, blood and water, and now there’s nothing left. I’ve been ready for my wrappings and my tomb for so long.

I have no hope that things will get better—or even stay the same. Things always get worse, always, always, but they can’t this time because thishasto work for Busy. It simply has to, so I’m trapped. I know it. He knows it.

He smiles again. “Have you ever heard the termfree use?”

I shake my head slowly. I’m still crying.

“You’d be at my disposal,” he says. “Whenever I need relief.” When I don’t respond, he clarifies in an affectionate tone. “Fucking, Birdie. Your hand, your mouth, your cunt, whatever I want. Whenever I want.”

I don’t know what I feel at that. I should feel shocked, but I’m already stunned by him knowing so much about Busy. I should feel repulsed, but instead, the frantic twist inside me is beyond desire or repulsion. Some elemental force that exists outside language or category—survival maybe.

Free use.It’s what it sounds like, I guess.

I close my eyes, my lashes wet on my cheeks, and ask, “And what am I supposed to get in exchange?”

“In exchange, your sister’s housing and medical bills will be taken care of. Completely. Forever. So long as she doesn’t end up staying in a private center in the Swiss Alps, you’ll never have to worry about affording housing or treatment for her again.”

That makes me open my eyes to look at him. His smile has faded, replaced with an expression so serious that it feels like an unspoken warning. He lets go of my jaw, but his stare is just as brutal as his fingers.

“I mean it, Birdie. She’ll be paid for and for the duration of her life. The trust is already funded and ready to make monthly distributions.”

“And you know how much everything costs?”

“When I apply myself, I’m a very good student. Remember?”

“That’s got to be… That’s so much money.” There were rumors when he was at Evelyn that two of his brothers were millionaires, but one brother had used that money to start a nonprofit, and the other had given it all away upon joining a monastery, so I don’t think the money came from them. “I thought you were an architect?”

“I am.”

“Then how can you afford to even think about something like this?”

“I’m also very good at being an architect,” he says without a hint of arrogance—or humility. “And not bad at renovating commercial properties on the side. Money is not a concern, and the trust will be solvent for the next sixty years. More if it’s managed well.”

Managed.With the offhanded casualness of someone with enough money that he can outsource its care.

I don’t have to concentrate to bring up the numbers in my mind. I’m always counting, always adding and subtracting, always hoping the math is a little kinder each time I do it. The nonprofit that owns the supportive housing property usually only asks for a third of the monthly housing fee, and then they cover the rest themselves, and most of the residents have SSI or Medicaid to help—or SSDI or Medicare. We don’t yet, so our share is $400 a month. That covers things like getting driven to appointments, medication disbursal, and utilities but not food or a phone plan. It’s about $100 a month for the groceries—supplemented by a biweekly trip to a church food bank—and $25 a month for the phone plan after a social worker helped Busy apply for a free phone.

Then there are the doctors’ visits, the therapists—the nonprofit has connected us to as many providers who offer low-income fee structures as possible—but it’s been $300 over the last two months for those. And the prescriptions…

The horror surges again in my chest as I hear myself ask, like I’m asking about a car a neighbor is selling, “Does this include paying for her medications too?”

“Yes.”

“For the rest of her life?”

“Yes.”

So $400 a month, plus the doctors and meds. Some medications we’ve gotten through grants, and some come with a rebate for the uninsured, but that’s still close to $100 a month. So $500 a month.

And then all I’d have to help with would be the groceries and her phone. Less than $200 a month. It would be tight, it would still be clawing through each day with my head down and my breath held, but it would bepossible. It would bedoable.

Oh God. Five hundred dollars a month for the rest of her life…a trust that would be solvent for sixty years or more. That would be—I do some quick math—$360,000 total. And that was only if he wasn’t planning on costs going up over time. It could be more.

That’s an amount of money that you’d require someone to earn every cent of.