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“I guess… I’d like to know how you make all your money. You don’t seem to have a job. Mom alludes to the fact that you make your own money somehow. But I’ve always wondered… if she’s just covering up the fact that Jacob pays for everything.”
“My dad doesn’t pay for everything. He never believed in just paying our way. He made us work for it from a young age, all four of us. I worked hard at hockey, and at school, to get scholarships. Dad always told me that he’d match whatever I made, but it wouldn’t just be a given that he paid for everything. I think he handled that part really well, actually.” I hesitated. “But then… the accident happened.”
I really didn’t know how much she knew about the car accident. But for sure, she must’ve heard about it.
“How old were you when it happened?” she asked me gently.
“Twenty. I’d already been drafted, but I wasn’t making any money as a hockey player yet. I was still in college, still hoping to get my chance to play for Vancouver. But then the accident happened and everything derailed. I was really fucked up for a long time. I had years of rehab. And things got really… dark… before they got any better.” I stopped there, wondering how much I should tell her. Wondering how much she already knew. “What did your mom tell you about it?”
“She just said you had a car accident that ended your hockey career. That’s pretty much what the internet said about it, too.” She bit her lip, like maybe she was wondering if it would bug me that she’d read about it online. But I pretty much assumed she would’ve, at some point. “Mom said you were in the hospital and in rehab for a long time and that it was really hard on Jacob. That’s all.”
“Yeah. It was.” I tried not to think about that part, but I’d have to be dead to not have noticed how hard on him it was. How hard on himIwas. “The physical rehab wasn’t even the worst of it. I got addicted to prescription pills for a while. Painkillers. And had a huge falling out with my family over it. Well, over my attitude, I guess. I’ve been told, by many, that I had the personality of a rabid wolverine at that point.”
“I never heard that,” she said softly.
“Dad sent me to rehab. And lucky for me, that seemed to take. I never went back to the pills, but rebuilding my life at that point… I’d done a lot of damage to my relationships with my family. And I was determined to rebuild my life my own way. But I was messed up for a long time, not just physically, but mentally. Dad tried to help me out as much as he could. He bought me the loft. He owns it. But I own everything else. This place. My cars.”
I hesitated again. I wasn’t used to talking about all this.
But I wanted to be honest with her.
“When I started making money fighting,” I went on, “I went to Brandon to invest it for me. A lot of it is in cryptocurrency, and he has a lot of experience with that. But he told me no. So Dad started investing for me, his own money. My inheritance. He amassed a small fortune for me over the years. I used to see it as guilt money. But now I’m not so sure. He gets a lot of flack from Brandon for supporting me so much. I’m not even sure why he does it anymore.”
“Maybe he just loves you and wants to help take care of you.”
Yeah. Maybe. “I haven’t touched much of that fortune, though. It just sits in the bank. Some of it gets reinvested. I mostly live off the money I make fighting.”
“Really?”
“There’s a lot of money to be made doing what I do. As long as you’re at the top. I win a lot of fights, I make a lot of money.”
“And this fight you have coming up… It’ll make you a lot of money?”
“As long as I win.”
“Do you think you will win?”
“Of course.”
She laughed softly at my cockiness. It wasn’t just cockiness, though. It was a mindset thing.
“If I didn’t think I was gonna win,” I explained, “I wouldn’t bother taking the fight. I go into every fight believing I’ll win. I just found out yesterday who I’ll be fighting, and I’ve already done the mental walk-through. I find out everything I can about my opponent. I picture myself fighting him and winning. I’ll do it constantly until the actual fight.”
“And that’s how you win?” Jolie smiled. “Sorry, I don’t know anything about fighting.”
“It’s not how you win, exactly. But it’s a part of it, for sure.”
“Does Jacob go to your fights?”
I kinda laughed. “Yeah, that’d be the day. Joss came once.”
“Only once?”
“It wasn’t really his thing. Brandon won’t come, out of spite. He’s not supportive about it. And Darcy… I never tell him where the fights are. I don’t really want him there.”
“Why?”
“Hard to explain. I guess I figure I’m already a bad enough role model.”
