AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Now that seemed a stupidly half-assed response. He’d improved on that, certainly, by bringing the repaired truck down to her ranch, but he’d fucked that up in the end by not being able to just say yes, he’d text her while he was away.
Could he do it now? After the way they’d left things this morning?
Maybe he could start by apologizing for that.
Hey, he typed. I’m sorry about this morning.
As he tried to think what more he should say, and wanted to say, his father came into the room. As Duncan looked up, his thumb grazed the send button.
Shit.
He stared at his phone. Should he send another message? Add the thought he’d been trying to think? Or would a second message seem like an afterthought—or make him look like a simp?
He set his phone down. Maybe it was better for that apology to stand on its own for now.
CHAPTER TEN
Late in the morning, Phoebe sat at the desk in the living room and worked on her Patreon. She tried to provide ‘exclusive content’ of some sort once a week. It had taken her a while to figure out what her patrons wanted that was special enough to feel like a real exclusive, but it turned out they basically wanted more of the same—longer videos of the animals, more information about their health and welfare. They loved content about vet and farrier visits almost as much as cute and/or silly animal antics.
Some of her most popular videos, on social media and Patreon both, were just closeups of the horses getting their hooves trimmed. People were fascinated—and some commenters even called it their ‘ASMR.’ Phoebe didn’t get it, but hey—whatever brought the donations in.
The end of the month was coming up, and she always did a recap post, like a big journal entry summarizing everything she and the animals had done on the ranch over the previous four weeks or so. Since Afghanistan, staring at words on a screen gave her a migraine after about twenty or thirty minutes, so it took her several days to write a long post like that.
It would be better if she started drafting the recap at the beginning of the month and added to it daily like an actual journal, so she’d have all the details fresh in her mind and could spend only five or ten minutes each day. But she hadn’t started out that way, and the drag of spending several days working on it at the end of the month made her procrastinate starting the next one right away, so Phoebe was caught in a dysfunction cycle of her own making.
Right now, the words were starting to make ghosts in her vision, the code-red sign for ‘get the fuck off the computer or else,’ so she saved her draft and prepared to get the fuck off the computer. Maybe she’d put a few more minutes into the draft after dinner.
On her way to close out of Patreon, she noticed that her number of top-tier patrons had dropped by two—actually, when she got a closer view, she saw that she’d lost three patrons at that level, including her two biggest patrons, but had gained one at the exact same donation amount of one of those she’d lost, the biggest donor by far. That struck her notice because her biggest donor was someone she knew in the real world: Evelyn Hanover, an elderly widow and well-known philanthropist in the Oklahoma animal rescue world. Her monthly donation was a custom $1978—the year she’d married her husband. She donated the same amount to all her favored rescuers.
The new patron, with an anonymized username (allsoulshavesouls) had set their donation at that exact same amount: $1978.
That oddity caught Phoebe’s interest enough to push a burgeoning panic to the back of her brain. She’d lost three big donors, nearly three thousand dollars of monthly income, but she’d gained most of it back in a strangely specific way. The obvious solution to the mystery was that Mrs. Hanover had canceled her donation under her own name and started a new one under an alias.
The two patrons she’d truly lost also had used their actual names for their accounts, so she knew they were both active in the animal-charity world. Neither of their names was Lydia Copperman, but an echo of the Rich Bitch she’d run off the ranch several days earlier rose up in her head: Do you understand that I can ruin you with a single phone call? One call, and the sponsors you do have will disappear.
It looked like Mrs. Reynolds Copperman of Copperman Resource Management was as good as her word. She had apparently decided to manage Phoebe’s resources straight out of existence.
