Daniel wasn’t at the library.
He wasn’t in the square either, or by the vending machines he treated like a second home between lectures. Garrett sent one message. Where’d you go? He got nothing back within the two minutes he was willing to wait, which told him everything he needed to know. Daniel had wandered off after something, the way Daniel wandered off after most things, and would resurface eventually with a story that made none of this his fault.
Garrett didn’t chase it. He put his phone away and started the walk home alone, the evening gone that particular flat grey it went in Manchester somewhere around five, streetlights not quite committed to being on yet.
His phone sat in his pocket. Weighed nothing. Felt like it weighed something anyway.
The place he passed wasn’t anywhere he’d normally have looked twice at. Chalkboard menu, cloth napkins, prices that didn’t need a pound sign because the pound sign was implied by everything else about it. Old Garrett would’ve clocked the window and kept walking before his feet had fully stopped.
He went in instead.
He ordered a steak, medium, with chips, sauce and a drink. He didn’t check the total before he ordered, which was the strange part. Not the money, the not checking. Twenty-two years of checking, and the habit just didn’t fire.
Fifteen minutes later, he was back on the pavement, almost sixty pounds lighter and full in a way he wasn’t used to being. The novelty had already started wearing thin. There was still more money in his account than he’d ever seen in one place in his life, and no obvious answer for what you did with ten thousand pounds when you’d never had to think past can I afford this?
He turned that over for the rest of the way home.
Rent, obviously. That was the boring, responsible answer, the one his dad would’ve given him without hesitation. Food. The reading list he’d been putting off buying. New shoes, maybe, since the ones he was wearing had a sole that flapped slightly on the left foot whenever it rained.
Or he could just leave it. Let it sit there. Not touch it and pretend the number wasn’t real until he actually needed it.
None of that felt like the right shape for the thought, though, and it took him most of the walk to work out why.
Sharon.
Her voice on the phone a few days back. The hesitation before she’d asked, like she already knew what the answer was going to be before she finished the sentence. He remembered exactly how that had felt on his end. Wanting to say yes and not having a yes to give her.
He had one now.
Not the whole ten grand. He wasn’t about to hand his seventeen-year-old sister five figures and see what happened. But enough. Enough that it would actually mean something rather than being a gesture he made to feel better about himself.
He didn’t call from the street. It didn’t feel like a street conversation.
By the time he got the door shut behind him and dropped his bag by the sofa, he’d more or less made his mind up. He got his phone out, found her name, and stood there in his own kitchen with his thumb over the call button the way you stand at the top of a diving board deciding whether the water’s actually going to be cold.
He pressed it.
It rang once. Twice.
"Hello?"
Not Sharon’s voice.
"Mum."
"Garrett!" Claire sounded exactly the way she always sounded when he called out of nowhere. Pleased, slightly thrown, like she hadn’t quite believed the caller ID before she picked up. "This is a surprise. You’re not in trouble, are you?"
"No."
"Good. How’s uni? Are you eating?"
"Fine. Yes."
"Sleeping?"
"Enough."
It was the usual shorthand, the questions she’d been asking him since he was eleven, and he gave her the usual short answers, except there was something easier in it tonight that he couldn’t immediately place. Maybe just that he had somewhere he actually wanted to be in the conversation, rather than waiting for it to end.
"What did you actually call for?" Claire asked, not unkindly. She’d always been better than his dad at hearing the gap between what he said and why he’d said it.
"Wanted to talk to Sharon."
"She’s not in, love. Popped out with Megan. Should be back any minute. Sit tight."
"That’s fine."
They kept talking. Claire asked, carefully, whether he was doing alright. Not the eating-and-sleeping kind of alright, the actual kind.
He didn’t tell her about the System. Didn’t tell her about the money sitting in his account like a small, ridiculous secret. But for once he didn’t shut the question down the second it arrived either. He let it sit a beat before he answered.
"Better than a few weeks ago."
It wasn’t the whole truth. It also wasn’t a lie, which for Garrett counted as unusually forthcoming.
He heard it before Claire said anything. The front door, faint through the phone, then footsteps.
Claire’s voice pulled away from the receiver slightly.
"That’ll be Sharon."
A voice from somewhere further into the house. "Who are you talking to?"
Claire’s smile came through even without him being able to see it.
"Your brother."
There was a pause before Sharon actually got to the phone. The sound of a coat coming off, footsteps that took their time. When she finally spoke, there was a stiffness to it that hadn’t been there the last time they’d talked, back before the money conversation had gone the way it had gone.
"Hey."
"Hey."
"You alright?"
"Yeah. You?"
"Fine."
A pause. Then, in the tone she always used when she was deciding whether to actually mean the joke or just throw it out as cover: "You never ring on a Tuesday. Someone die?"
"Not that I know of."
"Mum said you sounded weird."
"Mum thinks I sound weird when I use full sentences."
That got something out of her — not quite a laugh, but close enough that he heard the shift in her breathing. He asked about school. She gave him the short version at first — fine, boring, the usual — but when he didn’t fill the silence after it the way most people would have, she kept going almost despite herself. Something about a maths teacher who’d moved the mock exam up two weeks with no warning. Megan getting a detention for something that wasn’t even her fault, apparently, though Sharon told it in a way that suggested it might have been slightly her fault.
He listened. Made the odd sound to prove he was still there. Didn’t offer an opinion she hadn’t asked for.
Neither of them mentioned the last phone call. It sat between the words anyway, obvious as a piece of furniture nobody was looking at.
Claire’s footsteps faded off toward the kitchen, giving them the room she always somehow knew when to give.
Garrett let the silence run a second longer than was comfortable.
"Sharon."
"What?"
"I’ve got some money now."
There was a pause on the other end.
"What?"
"I can help. With the thing you asked about."
"How?"
He didn’t have a real answer for that one. Not one he could give her over the phone, not one he could give anyone yet.
"Things changed. I’m not going to explain the whole thing, but I’ve got money now."
"Right." He could hear her deciding whether to let that go or not. She didn’t. "That’s not an answer, that’s a sentence shaped like one."
"It’s the one you’re getting."
"How much?"
"Dunno, you tell me"
Silence. The kind where he could actually hear her deciding whether this was a joke.
"That’s not funny, Garrett."
"Not joking."
"You don’t joke, so that tracks, but this still isn’t funny."
He left it there. Didn’t explain the System, didn’t explain the £10,061.12, didn’t explain any of the last three days. She didn’t need the mechanism. She needed the number to be real.
"You don’t have money to give me."
"I do."
"How? You had, like, sixty quid to your name a fortnight ago. You told me that yourself. You made it sound like a personality trait."
"Things changed."
"That’s still not an answer."
"No. It isn’t."
She let that sit for a second, the way she did when she was deciding whether pushing further would actually get her anywhere with him. It wouldn’t, and she seemed to know it.
"How?" she said anyway, one more time, quieter.
He was already opening the banking app, thumb hovering over the transfer screen the same way it had hovered over her contact twenty minutes earlier. That same small stall, the habit of a person who’d spent his whole life needing to be certain before he moved money anywhere.
"Give me a minute."
"Garrett, don’t. Seriously, whatever you’re doing, don’t do something stupid with the little bit you’ve got. I mean-
He’d already sent it.
For a second, nothing happened on her end. She was still talking, something about how he didn’t need to prove anything to her, and then she stopped mid-sentence.
He heard the phone buzz. Hers, not his.
Silence.
"Sharon?"
"Hang on."
More silence. Longer this time. He pictured her looking at the screen, looking away, then looking back at it to check it hadn’t changed.
"Garrett, this says five hundred pounds."
"Yeah."
"Where did you get this?"
"I got lucky."
"You got lucky."
"That’s what I said."
"That’s not — you don’t get lucky. You get overdrawn. You once texted me a screenshot of a receipt for a meal deal like it was a war crime."
"Things change."
She clearly didn’t buy it. He could hear that in the half-second before she spoke again. But she also didn’t push, not properly — asked one more time, quieter, almost to herself rather than to him, and then let it go. The sort of thing you didn’t dig at too hard in case digging made it stop being true.
"Use it for what you actually need," he said. "You don’t owe me anything."
"I wasn’t going to buy you a card that says thanks bro, if that’s what you’re worried about."
"Wasn’t worried about that."
There was a longer pause than the number itself had gotten.
"Thank you," she said.
Quieter than the rest of the call. Not performed. Like she’d had to find the words somewhere she didn’t usually keep them.
Garrett let it sit for a second before he answered.
"Yeah."
"Dad home yet?"
"Not yet. Still at work, probably."
"What time’s he usually back?"
"Half six. Seven sometimes. Depends if someone’s shift’s fallen through and he has to cover it."
Garrett nodded despite knowing she couldn’t see him.
"Does he know? About the money you needed."
"No." A beat. "Didn’t want him to think I couldn’t manage."
That landed somewhere familiar. Garrett knew exactly what that particular kind of not-wanting felt like from the inside.
"You don’t have to tell him. Unless you want to."
She didn’t say anything to that straight away, but something in the quality of the silence told him it had landed the right way — like she’d been braced for him to say something else, something closer to a lecture, and was recalibrating now that he hadn’t.
"You’re being weirdly normal about this," she said eventually.
"I contain multitudes."
"You contain, like, four sentences and a bank transfer."
"That’s most people."
After that, the conversation loosened properly for the first time all call. She started talking about school again — actual school, not the guarded version. The maths teacher again, in more detail this time, and a whole reconstruction of the Megan detention saga that made it sound considerably more Sharon’s fault than the first version had. Somewhere in there she also mentioned, almost as an aside, that she’d been putting off telling Mum about wanting to drop a subject next year because she didn’t want another conversation about options and keeping things open.
Garrett didn’t tell her what to do about it. Didn’t offer advice she hadn’t asked for.
"You could just tell her," he said. "She’s not going to lose it over a subject."
"Easy for you to say. You already left."
"Doesn’t mean I don’t remember what it’s like."
That got a quieter kind of quiet than the rest of the call — the kind that meant something had actually registered rather than just been heard.
He just stayed on the line and let her talk, which apparently was most of what she’d wanted from the call in the first place.
"Sharon!" Claire’s voice, distant. "Dinner!"
Sharon glanced away from wherever she was sitting.
"Mum says dinner."
Garrett looked around his own flat. The kitchen he still barely used, the quiet that had nothing waiting in it for him tonight, no exams, no shifts, nothing pressing on the other side of the call.
For the first time since the System had shown up on his cracked screen, the money sitting in his account wasn’t the thing taking up the most space in his head.
"Alright," he said. "Go eat."
A beat.
"Night, Garrett."
"Night."
A pause, right before she hung up. "...Thanks. Properly."
"Yeah."
The call ended.
The flat went back to being just a flat. Quiet, a bit too big for one person, £9,501.12 sitting somewhere in an account that had never held four figures before this week.