But this… What the hell was Angela going to do?

Sam pressed Pause on the recording because she wasn’t any more capable of listening than she was of reading. Her brain wasn’t having it. Shit, fuck, damn, hell.

“Cruz!”

He came to the door again. “I’m not your beck-and-call girl, you know.”

Sam smiled, pleased by the predictable reply. “I need you.”

Freddie stepped into the office and closed the door. “What can I do?”

“I can’t concentrate on anything.”

“You shouldn’t even be here.”

“I don’t know what else to do but try to figure out who did this to my sister’s family.”

“You’ve got people who could do that for you.”

“I need to be involved.”

“I get that, but if it’s too much…”

“It’s all too much,” she said, mortified when her eyes filled with tears. “Sometimes I didn’t even like him because he could be so insufferable, but oh, how he loved my Angela.”

“Yes, he did.”

“He lost his job—and all his insurance—a couple of months ago.”

“Oh God. Sam…”

“What’s she going to do?”

He took a seat in her visitor chair.

Sam wiped away tears. She’d tried so hard to be strong for Angela that she’d barely taken five seconds to tend to her own grief over the brother-in-law she’d loved, even if at times he annoyed her.

“Someone should do a GoFundMe for her,” Freddie said.

“What’s that?”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s an online fundraising site.”

“I don’t know if she would want that.”

“She needs the money, Sam, and it’s not like the rest of you are rolling in it to the point that you can support her and her kids, too.”

“We have some money,” she said. “Especially since we moved to the White House and can’t shop or spend money on much of anything. And they can move to our place on Ninth Street.” Sam brightened at the idea. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before now.”

“That’s a great idea, but it’s just the start of what she’ll need going forward. Why don’t you give Tracy a call and see what she thinks of the idea?”

“Okay.” She made the call to Tracy and put the phone on speaker.

“Hey,” Tracy said. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going. What about there?”

“She still won’t eat. We have a call into the doctor.”

“That’s good.”

“She’s stressing out about how she’s going to pay for an appointment, let alone the birth.”

“Freddie has an idea about that. He thinks we ought to do a GoFundMe thing for her and the kids.”

“Mike said the same thing, but I wasn’t sure if she’d be into that.”

“Like Freddie said, she needs the money. It can’t hurt anything.”

“I suppose not, but the media will go crazy over a fundraiser for the first lady’s sister.”

“I don’t care about that. Let them. I was also thinking that she and the kids can move to Ninth Street. That place is paid for, and she could sell their place to get rid of that debt.”