Page 63 of Knocked Up by my Best Friend's Brothers

“When I was still at CalTech, we had a couple of recruiters come in from several major fintech corporations,” she says. “Perry-Sage was one of them. They gave us an assignment, and it became part of our doctoral theses. I came up with an investment product based on an extensive analysis of historical tendencies in the financial market. It was crazily accurate. I impressed them, let’s just say.

“After I graduated, I applied for several jobs at different companies, Perry-Sage included. I figured that since I’ddesigned a product that was so good that they ended up selling to their clients, they’d want me to be a part of the team. I was right, because they called back. But I never had an official interview. It was very cloak-and-dagger, you might say.”

“How so?” I ask.

“They wanted me to do a certain type of work that straddled the very thin line between investment products and fraud,” Christa says. “For me, it was a challenge from a mathematician’s perspective. I was eager to prove myself, to make money, to build my life and my career. So eager, in fact, that I didn’t read the fine print until it was too late.

“By the end of my first year with them, I could already tell something was off about how they were moving insane amounts of money in and out of the company—not to mentionthroughthe company. Given my clearance level and expertise, they had to give me access to pretty much everything, hence the NDAs and the secrecy surrounding my employment. I saw everything, and I noticed the patterns.”

“Does it have to do with money laundering?” River inquires.

“Oh, that’s just skimming the surface. Yes, Perry-Sage was literally the Mancinis’ go-to washing machine.”

The more she tells us about those people, the more intrigued I am by the level of her involvement. The tighter the knot in my stomach twists as I wonder where Christa decided to draw the line.

“How deep were the Mancinis involved?” I ask her, “at least as far as running the day-to-day operations went?”

“Barely,” she says. “One of their lieutenants would come in every other week for a briefing. My former boss, the head of the investment product department, would have me sit in on every meeting and explain how the products worked. How the clients were hooked, how much money rolled through, and how much we got to keep while the clients were told about losses and volatile markets.

“I always made sure they got some returns on their investments. Just enough to keep them hooked, to keep them pumping more money into every scheme. For a while, it worked. I didn’t feel too bad because most of Perry-Sage’s clients were just horrible people. Real estate and oil tycoons, corporate heads, and billionaires who had lots of disposable cash to throw around, hoping they would make even more. Greedy, heartless bastards.”

“That’s the story you told yourself so you could sleep better at night, right?” Cassius scoffs. I know his response is coming from a place of anger.

Christa looks genuinely distraught by my brother’s words.

20

Christa

“Yes,” I tell Cassius. “I slept better knowing I was karma to a whole lot of bad people with a whole lot of dark money. I told myself that the means justified the ends. For me, it was a double whammy, too, because I was able to prove to my employers that I was worth the higher salary and could twist and turn mathematics with the kind of skill that would’ve made the guys at Mensa green with envy.

“It gave me a sense of power and control over my fate. I felt stronger than ever, capable of doing whatever I wanted. I wasn’t the slim, pretty girl everybody liked and desired, but I was the smart one who would one day rule the whole world. It all seems laughable now, yet a few years ago, it was my truth.”

“So, what happened?” River decides to take the middle road, while Cassius averts his gaze altogether.

“I couldn’t sleep well anymore,” I reply with a shrug. “The lies I told myself no longer went down the way they used to. I started reading in the papers about entrepreneurs who trusted my investment products and put in all their money in hope of doubling or even tripling it. They ended up losing everything. Itled to ruin and misery. Death. Just tragedy after tragedy while I kept designing new schemes for Perry-Sage.

“The big sharks didn’t take the worst hits. They could brush it off and try again. Until I learned about mass firings. Thousands of people are out of a job because of my design,” I add.

Nausea tests me again. The prenatal vitamins and supplements the hospital prescribed before releasing me are already working their way through my system, taking the edge off most of my symptoms, but the additional stress isn’t helping my current state at all.

I have to power through the rest of this conversation, though. I owe them the truth, and I owe myself one less secret to carry every day.

“The more I learned about the damage my investment products were causing, the harder it became for me to come into work every morning,” I explain to Cassius, River, and Nathan. “I started proposing different strategies and products, including a few with a lower loss threshold. Lower risk options, too. Every single one of them got turned down because the Mancinis wanted more; they always wanted more.

“At the same time, they were pushing their dark money through the company, and I had to design schemes to help hide it. It got to be too much. Then Brett came to work for the company.” I pause as sadness flits through me.

“Brett?”

I always have trouble saying his name out loud. “Yes. He was supposed to help me with the money laundering part. We needed bigger and more complex schemes because the Feds and the SEC began circling tighter and tighter every month. It wasobvious that both the Mancinis and the leadership of Perry-Sage had bitten off way more than they could chew.”

“I’m guessing Brett was important to you?” Nathan asks.

“He was my boyfriend. We were friends first. Then one night, late at the office, he found the courage to ask me out. We dated for a few months,” I reply. “We got along well, both personally and professionally. He didn’t like the job either. In fact, he stopped liking it only a couple of months in. It took me about a year. I guess it makes him the better person.”

Nathan comes closer and shakes his head. “Not better, just different.”

“Did you love him?” Cassius inquires.

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