Maja sat down on the sofa. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, we can solve this. I can ask for more hours at the gallery. And what about my investment account? I know it’s not a lot, but maybe we could liquidate it and use the money to see us through, at least until the construction is done, and you find another job?” Maja had been surprised to learn that she inherited fifty thousand dollars when her parents sold family property in Poland after an uncle passed away. Ted invested the money for her in the stock market, and it had done pretty well. She’d always thought of it as a nest egg for her future children. A gift to them from the past.

Ted turned around and slid down the wall until he was seated on the floor. He looked up at Maja. “It’s gone,” he whispered. “Sold off, like everything else we were holding.”

At first, she didn’t believe him. “No, that can’t be,” she said. “How? Those stocks belonged to me. How could you sell them without telling me?”

“It was all invested under my name,” Ted said. “It just made it easier to manage.”

That wasn’t what Maja meant by her question. “But why didn’t you tell me?” she pressed, a real prickle of fear, like electricity, running from her scalp down to her neck.

“I’m so sorry,” Ted was saying. “I used the money from that account to cover some private trades that I made on margin. I was trying to trade our way out of this. I thought that if I could make a quick turnaround, we might be okay.” He was almost whimpering now. “But it didn’t pan out. All markets have winners and losers. This time, we’re the losers.”

Without even thinking about it, Maja was backing away from him. “I don’t even know you,” she said slowly. “I can’t believe you would lie to me about something this big. For so long. You let me just go on, thinking everything was fine, for weeks. I’ve been writing checks to the new contractor that I don’t even know if the insurance company will fully cover!”

“I thought I could fix it.”

“But you can’t,” Maja said, her voice flat.

“It’s too big to fix,” Ted said, sounding almost like he was talking to himself. “This isn’t just me. It’s everyone. We got greedy, and now there’s going to be a reckoning. And not just on Wall Street. They’re going to feel it everywhere.”

For a long moment there was silence between them, as Maja tried to make sense of everything she’d just heard.