Sunday Dinner, Portfolio Down 61%

Neil announced it between the roast potatoes and the gravy, which was, Sam would think later, a deliberate choice. You couldn't leave the table. There were guests. "So we've gone in," Neil said. "Properly. Katie and I talked about it and we've moved the deposit over." "The deposit," said Sam's mum. "For the house. Well, it'll be a bigger house now, that's the point." Katie was looking at her plate. Sam knew her sister's face, had known it for thirty-five years, and it was not the face of someone who had "talked about it". "All of it?" Sam said. "You've got to be in to win, mate." Their dad passed the gravy and said nothing, which was how their dad handled most things. That was March. The deposit was fifty-two thousand pounds, saved over six years in a flat in Reading that Katie hated. Neil had been "in" since the previous autumn, small amounts at first, then not small, and he had a way of talking about it, chart patterns and cycles and the halving, that made it sound like a science he'd been let in on. Sam had looked some of it up. Some of it was real. A lot of it was people on the internet saying the same thing to each other in a circle. By June the fifty-two thousand was sixty-eight and Neil brought it up at every family thing, and Sam had to admit, privately, that maybe she'd been the one who didn't get it. By September it was twenty. Nobody said anything about it at the birthday. That was the rule, unspoken, the way it always was in their family: a bad thing becomes a thing you don't say. Katie came without Neil. She said he had a cold. She'd got thin. Sam followed her out to the garden with two cups of tea. "How bad." "Twenty. Twenty-one. It goes up and down by the hour, he's always got the app open." "Is he selling?" "He says if he sells now he 'locks in the loss'. He says it'll come back. He says people who sold in 2018 are the biggest idiots in history and he won't be one of them."

"And what do you say?" Katie held the tea and didn't drink it. "I say we could have bought the house in Wokingham. The one with the garden. We had an offer accepted. He pulled out because he said we'd be able to afford something better in a year." "Katie." "Don't." "I'm not." "I know you're not. It's the face. Mum does it too." They stood there. Inside, their dad was doing his speech, the one he did every year, and someone laughed at the bit about the caravan. "It was my money too," Katie said, very quietly. "Half of it. I said yes. I want to be clear about that. I could have said no and I said yes because he was so sure and I was so tired of being the one who was never sure about anything." Sam didn't have anything to say that wasn't the face. So she put her tea down on the wall and put her arms round her sister, and Katie let her, which she hadn't done since they were small. "What do I do?" Katie said into her shoulder. "I don't know. Get him to sell half. Get the rest in a bank account with only your name on it. I don't know." "He'll say I don't believe in it." "You don't." "No." The kitchen door opened and their mum leaned out and said cake, and they went in, and the cake was lemon, and Neil wasn't there, and nobody said anything about that either. It was a good cake. Sam had two pieces. She kept thinking about the house in Wokingham, the one with the garden, and whether anyone was living in it now.