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Saturday, January 22, 2022

Emma ate breakfast later on Saturdays than the rest of the week, and with more ceremony, a mixing bowl of cereal with her phone propped against the milk carton. That morning she'd spent a while watching her father over the rim of it. Jake was standing at the counter with his coffee going cold, scrolling through headlines that all said roughly the same thing with different verbs: bitcoin plunges, bitcoin craters, bitcoin has lost half its value since November. Dana was asleep; she'd come off one night shift and had another that night.

Bitcoin had closed Thursday above $40,000, Friday it caved, and Saturday it kept sliding. His $3,000 was down to barely more than half, counting both halves, the one on the exchange and the one in the sock drawer. He hadn't sold a thing in two months, not the week he couldn't stop opening the app and not the night he dug through the recycling bin, and right now that didn't feel like patience so much as a slow way of being wrong.

"Dad."

"Yeah."

"Are you sad about the money?"

Jake looked up from his phone. Emma didn't look away.

"No, sweetheart. I just didn't sleep great."

She nodded the way she'd nodded in the car after the game, and went back to her cereal. Upstairs the floor creaked once, Dana turning over in her sleep, and after that the only sound in the kitchen was Emma's spoon.

Lunch at Linda's

Saturdays in January meant lunch at Linda's, because Linda had decided the family scattered too much after the holidays. Kyle showed up late, like always, and had his phone out before he'd even sat down. On the screen was the three percent platform with its column of daily payouts, one on top of the other, all the same. Not a single day missed, not even this week, with bitcoin falling everywhere you looked.

"This is what I've been telling you," he said, pouring himself wine. "Market goes up, market goes down, I don't care. They trade, I get paid. Anybody holding straight bitcoin right now is crying, am I right?"

Nobody answered, and Pam kept her eyes on her plate. Linda gave Kyle more mashed potatoes than he'd asked for. Across the table Emma looked at her grandmother, then at her uncle, and said nothing, because since Christmas Eve she'd learned not to say things at that table.

Tyler had come straight from his night shift and his eyes were red. He set his fork down.

"Have you taken any out, Dad? Real money, into your bank account."

"Why would I take it out? It pays me every day."

"That's why."

Kyle laughed and changed the subject, and lunch went where lunches go, the cold, football, Linda's knee. But Jake kept seeing his brother-in-law's screen, that column of payouts that never missed a day, and for the first time since October he had a thought he was ashamed to be having. What if Kyle was the smart one? What if the dummy at this table was the guy who'd bought the real thing?

He kept it to himself, the way he kept almost everything now.

The night

Dana left for the hospital at ten. Emma fell asleep on the couch halfway through a movie and Jake carried her to bed, which he could barely manage anymore, and stood in her doorway for a while with his phone in his pocket like a rock.

Then he sat down in the kitchen. He read an entire forum thread by a guy who said he'd sold everything that afternoon and could finally sleep, with fifty replies underneath calling him a coward or congratulating him, split about evenly. He read an article about other crashes that had taken months or years to come back, and thought of his father, who'd spent months waiting for Albright Supply to pay. The Fear & Greed Index read 13. He'd never seen it that low.

Then he did the math, which is what he always did when he was nervous. The joint account statement had come on the first, the word "roof" sitting right there in it, and Dana hadn't asked about it, same as December. But it had been two months now. The $2,000 still wasn't back where it belonged, the tax refund would come in March, and Dana had the Outer Banks booked in her head for the summer, with her mother. If this kept going, he thought, by March there wouldn't be enough left for the gas down there.

The other half, the one on the little black device, he didn't even check. It was in his nightstand under the socks, with the leaf pickup flyer folded into the instruction booklet, and to see what it was worth he'd have had to dig it all out, find the cable and plug it in, in the dark, in an empty bedroom. He couldn't be bothered. Mostly it felt like something close to embarrassment.

At midnight he turned off the kitchen light and went to bed, and didn't sleep.

Sunday, 3:40 a.m.

He got up without a sound, though there was nobody to wake but Emma, and went back to the kitchen without turning on the hall light. He sat in the same chair. The fridge hummed, and across the street there was one lit window, upstairs in the Hendersons' place, and Jake caught himself thinking that somebody else was looking at the same thing he was.

He opened the app.

All that was left on the exchange was the half he hadn't moved to the wallet, a bit over 0.022 bitcoin. It had cost him about $1,500. The screen said it was now worth around $800, and underneath, in red, a percentage that was nearly half. He sat there looking at that number with the same face he'd used for every number before it.

He tapped sell.

The app asked how much. Jake typed in the amount slowly, checking every decimal the way he'd checked the wallet address in December, and the button at the bottom lit up blue.

He tapped continue.

In the living room, the tablet was still plugged in on the TV stand, cycling through the shared family album the way it did every night since Emma had set it up. A basketball video went by, frozen on its first frame. Then Linda's seventieth birthday cake, the candles still lit. Then a folded sheet with twenty-four words in block capitals, written on the back of the leaf pickup flyer.

In the kitchen, Jake was waiting for the screen to finish loading. In the living room, nobody was watching.

Last updated: November 1, 2026