67.
Jamie
Jamie didn’t sleep well, or nearly at all, really. She had a lot of memories of waking up and seeing the red numbers of the clock in her bedroom tick their way through various combinations—11:07, 12:53, 1:38, and so on, at least a few times an hour until sometime after three.
Her alarm woke her just before six, and it was not a happy wake-up. Two days of mostly missed sleep had taken their effect, she realized, but the shower helped to reinvigorate her. The shower and her plan for the day, which was to roll back as much of the tide that had come in on her yesterday as she could. She had an idea about that. She had hope again.
Jamie didn’t let bad things get her down for long. It was a personal mission statement, really: bad things happened. But good things happened, too, and you just had to fight through the bad things long enough for some good things to rear their head in order to make the bad feelings recede.
So now, she had a plan. And the first step of that plan was to seek help, because she was plainly out of her league. Two hours of calls from her landline last night had left her with a litany of customer service representatives telling her the same thing: if their closures of her accounts were a mistake, they certainly couldn’t see it, and there was no record of any payments received on their end. Jamie had logged into her online banking to find even her personal accounts overdrawn, and any hint of prior payments utterly vanished.
It was enough to make her suspicious that she might have been singled out for reasons having nothing to do with the real Jamie Barton. No, this seemed like it might be related to the other name, the one she didn’t care for at all.
But there had to be a way to make it through this. She just needed expert help, and maybe someone she could sit down with, locally, that she could look in the eye and ask questions. Someone who wanted to be of help. Someone who knew finance, and had offered her assistance before things had started to go so horribly askew.
Which was why she was sitting in the lobby of the bank, waiting for Mr. Penny to show up to work.
There were a couple magazines spread out over a side table, but Jamie ignored them, staring straight ahead, trying to focus her thoughts on what she would tell Mr. Penny. She couldn’t tell him she was Gravity Gal, because in spite of however helpful he might want to be—and oh, she hoped that he would still want to be helpful—giving up her secret identity was not a step she was willing to take. She’d chosen it to protect Kyra. She’d stopped enough crimes here on Staten Island to have engendered some hostility from the local criminals. All it would take would be a few of them getting the idea that Kyra was fair game, and suddenly Gravity Gal would have a very obvious weakness to exploit.
Jamie’s eyes drifted to the television screen on the wall. Local news was playing, a chyron across the bottom of the screen decrying the damage done to the buildings in the attack yesterday. She took a breath, shaking her head. She saw the stunned faces of patrons and employees, still watching the coverage. There had been mercifully few deaths, but still, the events had evoked memories of a September day when the world had held its breath as New York was brought to its knees.
It was all a little too close—too close to home, too close to memory. And far too close for comfort.
“Ms. Barton?” Mr. Penny’s tone was mild confusion, and she looked over to see him standing at the entry to the bank, his briefcase in hand, his dress shirt missing that top button again. He wasn’t wearing a suit jacket, but that was good, because she could see the lines of his chest through his shirt and—
Ohhh.
She looked down, suddenly embarrassed, and said. “Mr. Penny. I was …” Her eyes flitted up to find his anchored on her like she’d made a gravity channel between them, “… I was hoping to have a few minutes of your time this morning.”
Mr. Penny opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and a smile spread warmly over his face. “Ah—yes, of course. If you’ll—” He gestured toward his office with his briefcase. He seemed solicitous, opening the door for her, ushering her in as he tried to clear his desk, which was as messy as hers. “I’m sorry, my first appointment today wasn’t until a half hour from—”
“I’m sorry for imposing on you,” she said, and then amended, “without warning. I just—I’ve had a problem that I—I don’t fully understand, and it has to do with banking and lending and—”
“I would be—happy, honored—uh, ecstatic, really, to be able to help you in any way,” Mr. Penny said, shoving his briefcase behind his chair and clasping his hands together, leaning forward as she sat down across from him. “In any way possible. So …” He kept that smile up, and Jamie did not mind it at all. “What can I help you with, Ms. Barton?”
“Please,” she said, “call me Jamie.”
“Jamie,” he said. “Call me Jacob.”
“Jacob.” Jacob and Jamie, she thought, that’s a—uhh, oh, “Uhm. So … since our meeting yesterday, my car has been repossessed—”
His eyes widened. “Oh.”
“—my house foreclosed upon, my credit cards and ATM card cancelled, my accounts locked and overdrawn,” this drew a frown from him, “basically every single financial setback you can imagine, I’ve suffered.”
He looked utterly perplexed. “That makes … that makes no sense. I looked at your credit report myself before I sent your application to underwriting and you were current on everything—” He turned his head to his computer, a black screen hovering off to the side of his desk and stirred the mouse. He typed something in and then slid the screen around on a levering arm. “I have a copy of it right here, and it’s—it’s pristine.” He gestured to the screen, and she could see nothing but numbers and lines of readouts. “Your credit is beautiful. It doesn’t look like you’ve missed a payment for anything in your entire life. Your revolving debt is low, your FICO score is high. And we verified your assets with the bank here, you had a few thousand in savings—” He tapped the keyboard again and then paused, did a double take, and said, “This is impossible.”
“What is it?” she asked, leaning over, trying to make sense of what he was looking at.
“Well, this is your account,” Penny said, “which I looked at yesterday, just before coming to see you. I was trying to figure out what the underwriting department saw that I didn’t, because—well, anyway, there was plenty of cash in here then, and it’s overdrawn now, but—but there haven’t been any withdrawals at all to account for the missing money.” He threw his hands up. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“And yet still they’ve cut me off,” she said. “My cell phone, my car, my house, my accounts, my credit cards—” She stopped short of telling him about her humiliations in the convenience store, and of eating five stale saltines for dinner. She was still feeling lightheaded, but at least she’d had coffee this morning. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Mr. Penny—”
“Jacob.”
“I don’t know what’s going on here, Jacob,” she said, regretting the lie, “but … it’s almost as though someone has decided to sabotage my finances.”
“Even your business,” he said, sounding almost awestruck before his tone switched to disgust. “Whatever’s going on here, if it’s affected you as you say, it’s probably the reason our underwriting turned down your loan.” He shook his head. “This is … I’ve never seen anything like this.” He paused, suddenly contemplative. “I wonder if this has anything to do with that cyber-attack yesterday?”
“I—what?”
“Oh,” he said, “the attack on Manhattan yesterday. They’re saying there was a hacker that jumped on the bandwagon looking to cause some chaos, that he messed with systems all over the area, but they weren’t very specific about it.” He stared at the screen. “At the very least, I mean—I looked at your account myself, there’s no reason for these changes with withdrawals or debits—it’s as though someone just reached in and magically changed the numbers.” He picked up a pad and started to write. “I can verify this because I saw it with my own eyes. I need to talk to my boss—”
“Thank you so much,” Jamie said, the first dose of relief she’d felt in a day trickling through like warm water down cold skin. “I’m so glad I came to you. I honestly did not know who else to turn to.”
“Well … uhm … we’re glad to have your business here,” Jacob said, flushing slightly, “and honored that you’d be able to come to us with a problem like this, and—and sorry that we have any part in making your experience, uh, terrible—”
“It’s all right,” she said lightly, finally feeling, for the first time since she’d been caught in that boat explosion, like something was going right. She ran fingers through her hair, settling back in the chair. “I can’t tell how stressful it’s been, seeing everything I’ve worked for go up in smoke in a few hours.”
Jacob stood up, coming slowly around the desk, and sitting down in the chair next to her. “I can’t even imagine. It was obvious to me just the short amount of time I was working on your account that Barton Designs means a lot to you. You’ve poured your life into building that business, and it’s an impressive accomplishment, even more impressive when you consider you’ve done it as a single mother—”
Her eyebrows arched up. She hadn’t even thought about it, but of course he’d know about Kyra if he had access to view her accounts. Her account was paired to Jamie’s, after all. “Thank you,” she said, feeling a little twinge of that warmth that she’d felt during their interview only a couple days earlier. He was sitting there, next to her, and he looked like he was holding himself back from doing something. Leaning in closer, maybe.
Jamie stared at him—those eyes, those lips—and she did some quite unexpected, as all the despair she’d felt in the last day lifted.
She leaned in and kissed him.
It was long and full and lovely, her eyes closed and the pressure returned on his end, his fingers lightly touching her face as they kissed. It had been a long time, a very long time, and she’d missed this. She could taste the faint minty aroma of his breath—
Her eyes sprang open and she broke from the kiss, suddenly aghast. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
He took a moment coming back from it, like he’d just wakened from a dream, and his cheeks flushed hard scarlet beneath the stubble that she found oddly rugged and alluring. “I—ah—uhm—I’m sorry, that was—so unprofessional of me—”
“It was my fault,” Jamie said hurriedly. “I came in here and asked you for help, and then I go and—do that—”
“I feel like I’m preying upon you,” he said, obviously embarrassed, “as though I predicated my help on you doing—doing that—that wonderful—” He stopped himself, and took a long breath. “I wanted to do that even absent helping you.”
Jamie stared back at him. “I wanted to do that even if you told me there was nothing you could do to help.”
“Well, okay then,” he said, and he smiled, a smear of lipstick making his lips look slightly pink. And he leaned back in to kiss her, and she did not mind at all.