I opened the old email and found the line he’d clearly forgotten about. Under the repayment terms, he’d written, “If I can’t pay you back by spring, I’ll sell the boat.” I read it twice because at the time he’d never owned a boat, and the sentence had seemed like a harmless detail in a serious promise. But now he had a boat, and he’d never once mentioned that particular promise to me. I printed the email and put it in a folder before I called him. He answered casually, like nothing in the world had changed.
I asked him when he planned to repay the forty thousand dollars. There was a long silence, followed by a laugh that didn’t sound anything like the brother I remembered. He said the money had been “gone for years” and that I couldn’t suddenly start treating a family favor like a business transaction. I reminded him that he’d written the repayment terms himself, including what would happen if he didn’t pay. Then I told him I had the email. He stopped talking completely.
The next morning, he sent me a message asking if we could meet without our mother knowing. I almost agreed, but then I noticed something in the original email I’d completely missed. He hadn’t written the repayment terms from his personal account. He’d sent them from the business account he was using to apply for a loan that same month. I forwarded the email to my attorney and asked her to look at it. An hour later she called and said, “Don’t meet him alone, and don’t delete anything.” Then she told me to check the date on the boat purchase, because it might explain exactly where my forty thousand dollars had gone.
