Silver ||Joel Miller||

'Laura Richards On How to Dominate the Investment Market'

"Well, all I have left to tell is before," Laura said. His body tensed at the words. She wasn't serious... was she? "But you're probably not interested in that."

"Uh, why wouldn't I be? I only know little bits, you've never told me the whole thing." And unless Laura had lied to him back on that staircase in Kansas to make him feel better, she wouldn't give the whole story now either.

"And I won't be now, either, but I could give you most." Laura offered, and his breath got caught in his throat. "Do you have anywhere you want me to start?" Joel was sure the question was directed to him as well, but he couldn't bring himself to say anything. To talk about their lives from before the fungus had meant to cross a line, it had been that way for the three years they'd been together for. And now... now she was...

"Well when we made the code words, you said silver was from hospitals... how do you know that?" Ellie asked, and his heart hammered in his chest. If she answered this then Laura was really about to hand him her past on a silver platter.

"Well, I told you about Nolan before, but I don't think I told you he was a doctor." Laura really was going to tell them everything, well, maybe not everything but she was going to let them in. Jesus, Laura was going to let him in. "He was actually on the path to becoming a neurosurgeon, it's what he'd always wanted to do. I visited the hospital a lot when I had the time, so he told me the code words they used so I would always know what was going on." Shit, a fucking neurosurgeon? She'd been engaged to a neurosurgeon? He crossed his arms over his chest and tried not to give away how he felt. A neurosurgeon... and Joel had been in construction.

"What did you do?" Joel asked, and Laura looked over to him with wide eyes.

"Technically I didn't do anything," she replied with a grimace. "God, you would have hated me if we ever met before this all happened." Impossible. It would be physically impossible for him to have hated her.

"What do you mean you didn't do anything?" He asked. Laura took a sharp inhale as it all pieced together for him. Engaged to a neurosurgeon, got into archery instead of guns... "Don't tell me you were a trust fund baby." The grimace on Laura's face softened to a strained smile.

"What the fuck is a trust fund baby?" Ellie asked. The question snapped Joel away from Laura's eyes. Damn it. Even after two and a half months of practice, he still got distracted by her far too easily. Or maybe that distraction had become worse.

"Rich families could set up these things called trust funds which were holdings of money or investments made by a person, such as a parent, for a third party, such as a child. Trust fund babies were a stereotype for kids that had a trust fund in their name. They were seen as adult-children who had no responsibilities at all and just did whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to do it." Laura explained it before she turned to look back at him, and he had to hold his breath. "I was a trust fund baby, yes, but I swear I wasn't pretentious."

"That's impossible," Joel replied. It was, usually, impossible for anyone who was rich to not be a pretentious asshole. But he guessed he'd never thought of Laura as one...

"No, really. There were terms to my trust, if I wanted the money then I had to work. So I started working at sixteen." Laura should have been smiling as she spoke. Why wasn't she smiling?

"At what? A Chanel store?" Joel asked. It was half a joke and half a jab, but it didn't make Laura break a smile like he'd hoped. Her face was stone cold as she looked at him, shaking her head briefly.

"I had to work for the, um... family business." Family business? Why did she say it like that? She was from Canada, so surely her family wasn't mafia related. "I managed to weasel out of the terms after I turned twenty with a good lawyer, left the business behind and moved to America to make my own way. I got into investing and when I kept making a fortune I started donating as much as I could. I met Nolan at a charity dinner for the hospital he worked at in Boston." What the fuck was this family business? Why did she distance herself from it?