My Best Friend Sent Me Ten Million Dollars

The notification came in while I was sitting on the edge of my bed, one shoe on, one shoe off, trying to remember if I had taken my allergy pill. Eighthirty-seven dollars and forty-three cents was my balance when I went to sleep. I knew that number the way you know your own weight, the way you know the exact distance between your apartment and the bus stop. It was the number that made the math work, barely, every month of my adult life. Then the phone buzzed. PNC Mobile: A deposit of $10,000,000.00 has been posted to your account ending in 4471. Available balance: $10,008,347.43. I read it four times. I read it the way you read a word in a language you thought you spoke and suddenly do not recognize. I was still staring at the screen when the text came through. Nora. A video. I pressed play with a thumb that felt like it belonged to someone else. She was on a beach. White sand, water the color of a swimming pool, and she was wearing a red bikini I had never seen, her hair longer than the last time I saw her, pulled back with a clip that looked expensive. She was smiling with her whole face. "Hey, you got the money, right? Don't tell me you're still sitting there looking at your phone like it's a math problem. It's real. Quit that job. Quit it today. Get on a plane. Go somewhere you've always wanted to go. You've been giving your whole life to that place and they pay you like you're a temp. Take the money. Be happy. I'm serious." She laughed, and the sound was light, and then the video ended. I called her immediately. Straight to voicemail. I called again. Voicemail. I typed: Nora. What the hell. Call me. She didn't. I sat there in my apartment, one shoe on, one shoe off, in a town house I rented from a man who raised the rent twice in two years, and I did the math. Nora works for the county. She has worked there for eleven years. She started at thirty-one, and now she makes forty-two thousand and change, and I know this because she told me, because we have been telling each other our numbers since we were seventeen and splitting a pack of cigarettes behind the gas station on Route 9. Forty-two thousand a year. Even if she saved every dollar, even if she never bought groceries, she would need two hundred and thirty-eight years to save ten million dollars. I put my shoe on. I picked up my keys. And I drove to her apartment. She wasn't there. Her car was gone. The blinds were open, which they never were, and through the window I could see that the living room was empty. Not messy. Empty. The couch was gone. The TV was gone. The small framed picture of her mother that always hung by the door was gone. I tried the door. It was unlocked. Inside, the apartment smelled like cleaning solution. The carpets had vacuum lines in them, fresh ones, the kind that say a professional was here. There was a single sheet of paper on the kitchen counter, folded in half, with my name on it in Nora's handwriting. I unfolded it. "You're going to be fine. Don't look for me. Do not call the police. I mean it, Cassie. Do not call them. Everything is handled. I love you. Go live." I read it standing in the middle of her empty kitchen, and I felt the floor tilt under me. Because I have known Nora Mercer since we were five years old. I know the way she writes her Gs, the way she dots her Is too hard. And I know that Nora, my Nora, would never write a note like that. She would not tell me not to call the police. She would tell me exactly what was happening, in too much detail, and then she would ask me to bring her a coffee. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. I put the note in my pocket. I locked her door behind me. And I drove to work, because it was eight-fifteen on a Tuesday, and I didn't know what else to do. At my desk, my phone buzzed again. A number I didn't recognize. I answered. "Ms. Vaughn?" A man's voice, smooth, educated, the kind of voice that has never had to ask for anything. "Who is this?" "You received a transfer this morning. Ten million dollars. We need to talk about where that money came from." I looked at my computer screen. My salary information was on it. Fifty-one thousand a year, and a health insurance plan that covered everything except the things that actually happened to me. "I'm listening," I said. "No, Ms. Vaughn. You're not. Not yet. But you will be." He hung up.