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Chapter

Thirty

Nate read the text again and sighed. And then he did the mature thing, which was to call instead of texting back.

“Who is it?” Leo asked.

“Jonah.” Nate was already dialing. “My brother’s about to tell me I’m an idiot.”

Briefly he considered taking the call outside, but Leo would follow him anyway, and at this point, what did Nate have left to hide?

So Nate leaned back against the counter, Leo still hovering beside him.

Jonah picked up and skipped the hello. “Tell me you’re taking it down.”

“Good evening to you too.”

“Nate.”

“It’s not coming down.”

“Okay.” A breath on the line. Jonah considering his next argument. “Then walk me through it. Help me understand why you’re putting a ghost on the internet.”

“I didn’t put him anywhere. He volunteered.”

Silence.

“There are rules,” Nate tried to explain. “We negotiated them. Nothing on camera confirms anything. He decides what he does and when. If he wants to stop, we stop.”

“You negotiated your content with the ghost?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re saying that like it’s a normal thing to do.”

It had felt normal in the kitchen where it happened. Nate chose not to mention that.

Beside him, Leo had gone very attentive, clearly straining to hear Jonah’s side of the call. Nate put the phone on speaker.

“The compilation wasn’t us,” he said then, to Jonah. “Someone scraped my old videos. I didn’t even know half that stuff was on my audio.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? It took three days for this to get this big. Three days. You know what happens next. Somebody from school finds it and makes a comment about how you were a freak back then too. That’s all it takes and you’re getting that label back. Except this time it’s public, it’s permanent, and it’s attached to your business.”

Nate looked at the ceiling.

He knew this. He didn’t need his brother to point it out to him.

“You can’t need the money this badly.”

Nate balked at that. “I told you how much the roof was going to be.”

“So sell.” Jonah didn’t miss a beat. “And don’t try to argue you can’t because of the ghost. Mom would take him off your hands in a heartbeat and you know it. So sell the place and wash your hands of this disaster while you still can.” He paused. “I never agreed to your walking away from the family business, but I understood. It got to be too much. I don’t want to watch you throwing away the life you built for yourself.”

Everything Jonah was saying made sense.

Damn his big brother for being reasonable.

And yet…