Chapter 429 | Let’s Find Your Ghost

Chapter 429: 429 | Let’s Find Your Ghost

The Newport Beach Starbucks at 7:15 AM on a Monday morning had the particular smell of desperation and overpriced oat milk that Cassie McKnight associated with people who hadn’t figured out how to make coffee at home. She’d ordered a black americano, told the barista to skip the syrup upsell, and claimed the corner table with the power outlet before the laptop warriors could descend.

Her MacBook Pro cast blue light across the spreadsheet that represented three months of her brother’s financial existence.

Forty-seven anomalies. Highlighted in red. Screaming at her from the screen like sirens.

Cassie took a sip of her coffee and scrolled back to the beginning.

January 10th. The day everything changed, according to their mother’s tearful timeline. Jordan had called their father, apologized for being a disappointment, and promised to do better. Standard rock-bottom rhetoric. Cassie had heard it before from traders who blew their books and came crawling back to the desk with promises of reform.

But then.

January 10th, 2:47 PM. StellarNote Media LLC. Three thousand dollars.

Cassie had spent forty minutes last night searching for StellarNote Media LLC. The company existed. Barely. Registered in Delaware six months ago, no public filings, no website, no social media presence. The kind of shell entity that existed to receive money and do nothing else.

What the hell was Jordan doing sending three thousand dollars to a ghost company on the same day he supposedly hit rock bottom?

She highlighted the entry again. Bright red. Like blood on a balance sheet.

January 15th. Micro Center. One thousand eight hundred forty-seven dollars.

Jordan didn’t like computers. Jordan didn’t understand computers. Jordan had once asked their father how to connect to WiFi on a device that was already connected to WiFi. The idea of him walking into a Micro Center and spending nearly two thousand dollars on electronics made about as much sense as their grandmother joining a CrossFit gym.

January 18th. Koi Palace Aquarium. Eight hundred forty-seven dollars.

Fish. Her brother supposedly bought fish. Or fish equipment. Or something related to fish. Jordan, who had killed three successive goldfish in elementary school by overfeeding them because he couldn’t remember whether he’d already dropped the flakes in.

January 22nd. Giuliano’s Italian Kitchen. Two hundred fourteen dollars. Normal. Family restaurant. Probably a date with the girlfriend.

January 23rd. Iron Coast Gym. Monthly membership. Seventy-five dollars.

This one made Cassie pause. Jordan had never been inside a gym voluntarily. Not once. Not even when their father offered to pay for personal training sessions during Jordan’s sophomore year of high school. Jordan had said, and Cassie remembered this distinctly because it had made her want to throw her phone across the room, that he didn’t see the point of moving heavy things from one place to another when you could just leave them where they were.

Now he had a gym membership.

And visible abs.

And a jawline that looked like someone had taken a chisel to the soft dough of his former face and carved out an actual human being.

Cassie scrolled further.

The deposits were worse than the expenses. Or better, depending on how you looked at it. Irregular amounts appearing in Jordan’s account every few days. Two hundred seventeen dollars. Four hundred thirty-one dollars. Eight hundred ninety-two dollars. Never round numbers. Never predictable intervals. Always slightly more than he’d spent in the previous twenty-four hours.

She pulled up a calculator app and ran the numbers.

Total expenses since January 10th: fourteen thousand seven hundred twenty-three dollars.

Total deposits since January 10th: sixteen thousand nine hundred forty-one dollars.

Net positive: two thousand two hundred eighteen dollars.

An eighteen-year-old college freshman with no job, no investments, and no visible source of income had somehow generated a two-thousand-dollar surplus over six weeks while spending money like he’d discovered a cheat code for life.

Cassie closed the calculator and stared at the spreadsheet.

She wanted to be proud of him. She really did. The version of Jordan that had shown up to dinner on Saturday was everything she’d spent eighteen years hoping he would become. Confident. Present. Capable of maintaining eye contact for more than three seconds without looking like he wanted to apologize for existing.

But the numbers didn’t lie.

And these numbers were lying.

Cassie opened a new document. The cursor blinked at her. Waiting.

She typed: Jordan Investigation, Week 1 Objectives.

Then she deleted it.

Too clinical. Too much like work. This was her brother, not a trader she suspected of front-running client orders.

She typed instead: Jordan.

Just his name. Sitting there on the blank page like an accusation.

Her little brother had been a failure. Cassie had accepted this by the time he turned sixteen. Some people were born with the drive to succeed, and some people were born to consume resources and produce nothing of value. Jordan fell into the second category. He’d inherited their father’s height and their mother’s eyes and precisely none of the ambition that had built three convenience stores from nothing.

Cassie had written him off. Not consciously, not in any documented way, but she’d mentally categorized him as a lost cause. The family embarrassment. The one they’d have to support forever because he couldn’t support himself.

And then.

Christmas. The parking lot. The crying phone call. Their mother’s hysterics.

Cassie had expected Jordan to spiral further. To drop out, maybe. To move back home and spend the rest of his twenties playing video games in his childhood bedroom while their parents made excuses for him at family gatherings.

Instead, he’d transformed.

New body. New confidence. New girlfriend who looked at him like he was worth looking at, and based on Saturday’s encounter, at least one other woman leaving bite marks on his chest like he was a piece of property worth claiming.

The old Jordan couldn’t have attracted one woman. This Jordan apparently had a surplus.

Cassie sipped her coffee. It had gone cold. She didn’t care.

The problem was that transformations like this didn’t happen. Not in real life. Not without external intervention. Not without someone or something pushing from the outside.