“I’ll bring it.”

“What about my friends?”

“We’ll talk to their parents.”

He nodded. Then he asked something that caught me completely off guard. “Did Uncle Gage do that because you wouldn’t sign something for him?”

I met his eyes in the rearview mirror. He’d heard more adult conversation than I’d realized. “Yes.”

Three days earlier, Gage had asked me to co-sign a thirty-two-thousand-dollar boat loan. His income had fallen after he lost several clients, and his debt was already too high for approval.