He stared at her. “What do you mean, we’re screwed?”
“I mean, I don’t know how we can make the payments. On our current combined income, we can’t. Simply put, Brett, that big luxury tour boat you bought is not bringing in the money projected when we took out the loan. In fact, it’s essentially bleeding money. It’s nothing but a huge financial drain. We have to find a source of money from somewhere to pay off the loan, or . . .”
“Or what?”
“What always happens when you don’t pay your loan. The bank will come after your collateral. In this case—our house.”
“Are you talking bankruptcy?”
She shrugged. “Possibly.”
“Shit,” he said, and fell back against the sofa. There was a moment of silence as they both absorbed the impact of that word. “I bought the boat for a steal,” he said by way of self-defense. “Half its original value.”
“A boat’s not like a house, Brett. It doesn’t go up in value over time. It sinks. No pun intended.”
He nodded grimly. “Okay, then. I’ll sell the boat.”
Cara had already thought of this and discussed it with a maritime company. “We have to do that,” she said in the same monotone that the loan officer had used with her when her own voice began to rise. “But it won’t be enough. Just in the few years we’ve had it, it’s taken a tremendous loss. What’s that saying? The two happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day he buys his boat and the day he sells it.”
Brett didn’t laugh. His face was filled with regret. “I’m sorry, Cara. I really thought—I hoped—it was a good idea.”
He sounded so dejected her heart lurched. She’d been dubious about the investment at the time but, when faced with Brett’s unwavering optimism, she’d relented, even though a part of her had known it was a poor business decision. And now they were both going to pay the price.
She scooted to his side of the sofa and put her hand on his thigh. “I know you did. You convinced me.”
Brett smiled wryly. “Not really.”
She laughed softly and shook her head. “Not really.”
“So what do we do now?” he asked her.
She sighed and leaned back against the sofa. This part was the hardest. “That’s what I spent the afternoon talking to the loan officer about. Basically, we have to make the payments, and to do that we have to come up with a new source of income, fast. We both know that the boat won’t sell quickly—if it sells at all. So the next thing to consider is laying someone off.”
“Who?” Brett asked, alarmed at the prospect. “We’ve already laid off everyone but me and Robert. We need two to crew a tour at bare minimum. We have interns working in the summer. And you—”
“I don’t get paid,” she finished for him. When they had purchased the boat, Cara had volunteered to give up her salary until the boat brought in some money. It never did.
Brett’s smile was filled with love and compassion. “No.”
Cara curled her legs up beneath her on the sofa. “We could sell the house.”
Brett frowned and clasped his hands together. “Where would we live?”
“We could move into the beach house.”
“But it’s rented.”
“Actually, being rented is not a problem. We’d just have to find a place to rent until the beach house is free.” She waited while he digested this. “This place should sell quickly, and for a good price. It’s on deep water.”
“Well, why sell this house? The beach house will fetch more money. And we don’t live there. We wouldn’t have to move.”
“True.” She looked at her hands. She’d known he’d fight to save this house. It was his home, after all. His name was on the deed. He’d lived in it for years. But not nearly as many years as she’d lived in her mother’s house. “Brett, I’ve gone over and over this at the bank, and our options are limited. It’s really very simple.”
Cara held up her hand and began counting off. “One, we sell the boat.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s not likely to happen and, even if it does, it might not bring in enough money to dig us out of this rut. Two, we lay someone off. You just told me that can’t happen. Three, I quit and get a decent-paying job. Or should I say, a job that pays anything.” She paused and licked her lips. “At my age, that’s not going to be easy, but it’s possible. The downside? It might take too long to get a job that will pay me what we need for the loan. Four, we sell this house. Or five”—she paused—“we sell my beach house.”
“I go for number five,” Brett said automatically.
Cara tightened her arms around herself and stared at him with barely constrained anger. “Let me get this straight. You don’t want to sell your house. You want me to sell my house, an heirloom from my deceased mother, to pay off the debt from your tour boat.”
“Are you forgetting how we got caught in this financial bind in the first place?” Brett said brusquely.
Cara’s eyes flashed. “Of course I’m not forgetting. I’ll never forget. And it wasn’t just your money we spent. It was all my savings, too. We both invested everything we had into those in vitro programs.”
Her voice choked up as she recalled the endless hormone shots, the ice-cold metal tables, the doctors’ furrowed brows as they gave her and Brett bad news, again and again, cycle after cycle. First hope, and then stubbornness, and finally denial had kept them coming back long after they should have stopped trying, and long after they could afford to. But the rainbow baby they’d so desperately longed for had never come. And when Cara had decided to turn toward adoption, she’d been shocked and dismayed when Brett—kind, caring Brett—hadn’t followed.
He’d had reasons. He’d dreamed of having his own biological child—one that looked like a perfect combination of the two of them. He’d also wanted to enjoy a pregnancy with Cara, to hear the child’s heartbeat, to watch the ultrasound excitedly as the doctor told them whether it was a boy or a girl. Finally, he was firm that he wouldn’t feel the same way about an adopted child that he would about a biological child.
Cara had been devastated by her failure to give Brett that child. But Brett had never blamed her. Instead he’d descended into what she could only call an early midlife crisis. He was determined to make his mark in life. He went gung-ho for his scheme of expanding his business—buying the luxury tour boat. By that point, Cara was numb with depression and really didn’t care one way or the other.
It felt like something had just sucked all the air out of the room. Cara rose from the sofa and paced to diffuse the whirlwind of emotions. The anger was gone, replaced by a pervasive anguish that she knew both of them kept deeply buried.
“I don’t want to fight,” she said wearily, worn out from the day’s back-and-forth maneuvers at the bank to try to come to some sort of workable plan.
Brett’s anger dissolved in an instant. He came to stand by her at the window and wrapped his arms around her. “I don’t, either.”