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“Yeah, we haven't really broached to the subject yet,” he says to Sander, then to me, “Sorry, I just wanted to give you at least a day to relax.”
My immediate reaction is to snap at both of them. I'm not really into the idea of them facing my issues head-on while I'm just hiding and healing. I know that they both mean well, and that this is the only way to be sure that matters are dealt with. As much as I told myself that everything I was doing to keep these problems at bay was working, it's clear that it wasn't. Mateo would have just continued collecting weekly payments from me until I had nothing left to give. This is how things have to be done, regardless of how I feel about it. My ego will have to deal with it.
“No, that's fine. I completely understand,” I say, and smile at him.
“Well, he can fill you in on the details later. Obviously, you and your mom are staying here because we don't know where Mateo is and if he issued the hit on you or if that was just his guy acting on his own. Either way, I've been doing a bit of digging and something stood out to me,” Sander says.
“What?” Bodhi asks, standing up a little straighter.
“K, you know how you said you only told Bodhi and I about your eviction warning?” Sander asks, and I nod.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“You asked me if I’d paid it for you that day on the beach,” he says.
“You asked me, too,” Bodhi says.
“And you both said you hadn’t,” I say, looking back and forth between the two of them. I never really had time to think about it, but now that Sander is bringing it up, I’m curious.
“Right, well, that had me thinking, so I called in a favor and had the bank footage from that day pulled,” he says.
“But when I asked them to, they said they couldn’t pull it. That they couldn’t tell me who was making deposits into my account,” I say, crossing my arms.
I mean, what kind of shit is that? It’s my account. Shouldn’t I be able to know who’s depositing money into it?
“Well, I have a little more pull than you do, even if it is your account in question,” he says, offering me a sort of lopsided smile in apology.
“Yeah, yeah, Officer Harding, we get it.” I roll my eyes playfully and wave him on.
“Anyway, I pulled it up, and you aren’t going to believe who it was. Hell, even I’m having a hard time believing it.”
“Harding, come on,” Bodhi says, nearly cutting him off.
Sander laughs and turns to me.
“It would appear your boyfriend isn’t a fan of my storytelling techniques,” he says.
“What technique? You skirt around the topic for five minutes before actually getting to the point,” Bodhi says.
Sander tends to go off on a tangent when he really gets into a story. He says it adds flavor, but really it drags it out and keeps attention on him for a while longer, which was something he always enjoyed growing up.
“San,” I say his name, willing him to continue.
“Yeah,” he says, all signs of humor gone. “It was Mateo.”
I heard what he said, but I think I must have heard him wrong. It sounded like he said Mateo—
“That piece of shit paid her late fees?” Bodhi hisses, voicing my current thought.
It just didn’t make any sense.
“According to the footage and the timestamp on both the security footage and the deposit made to your loan account,” Sander confirms, directing his attention toward me.
“But… why?” I ask. “That doesn’t make any sense. He’s…” I glance between Bodhi and Sander, knowing that I’m in safe company and can speak freely about everything I’ve been dealing with, but it’s still a weird feeling after all this time.
“He’s forced me to pay off a debt that he thought Eli owed him — which is total bullshit in and of itself — and then when I say I can’t, he’d make these sometimes not so thinly veil threats. He’s gone so far as to follow me around town, keeping tabs on me.”
“He what?”
