He’d have said something dismissive, but there was a fine line to walk here—until he figured out how to get them all to vacate his house.
Osei
I needed to get away. I’ll be back in London soon.
Dad
Are you with a girl?
He thought about the woman yesterday. He wished.
But it was the perfect out—the only thing his dad would understand. So he took the out.
Osei
There may be someone.
Dad
Good! You need sons, Daniel.
Osei
I should go. Talk to you later.
Dad
The money?
He stared at the text, trying to figure out how to answer it. He decided vague was the way to go. He’d text Kofi later to make sure he had everything he needed.
Osei
I’ll see if I can wire some.
Talk to you later.
He deleted the texts and leaned his head back against the couch. How many days had that bought him?
Forget waiting for MacNiven to decide his fate—he was going to contact Winners Inc. as soon as they opened.
Sleep was out, so he got up and opened the curtains to a dark wintery morning. Getting a couple bottles of water from the mini bar, he returned to the couch and opened his brokerage app.
He’d started trading in high school. He’d stumbled across a website that had made it seem easy, so he’d had his mom help him open a brokerage account with two hundred dollars that he’d saved up from mowing lawns the previous summer. He’d wanted to buy a ticket to Africa, to meet his dad, and Ortiz needed help with his college tuition. Trading seemed like a good way to make a little to help them both out.
It turned out he was really good at it.
More, he loved it. It just made sense to him. Ortiz gave him money to invest for him too, and by the time they started college, he’d made himself and Ortiz a comfortable savings.
It’d been nice, being able to take of things at home more. His mom worked hard and made great money, but she was in debt for med school so most of their extra money went there.
Not that she let him pay it off, though he’d offered lots of times.
She wouldn’t let him buy her a house either. She used to tell him that he was her son, not her sugar daddy, that she was responsible for her own debts.
He’d started playing football at eighteen, and since he’d been so successful trading, the exorbitant salary didn’t fuck him up the way it had a lot of the other guys who’d gone from poor backgrounds to suddenly having everything. By the time he was eighteen, he was well on his way to making his first million, and he was managing Ortiz’s finances as well.
His dad didn’t know about his trading or the money he made from it.