Chapter 3

At eight in the morning, every last one of the old folks was hammering Geoff with mentions in the group chat.

"Geoff, it's eight already. Where's breakfast?"

"Geoff, we're starving over here. What's going on with you?"

They kept it up from eight all the way to ten, and Geoff still hadn't shown his face.

That was when they started to panic. A few of them had low blood sugar and couldn't take it, so they went digging through their cupboards for white sugar and ate it straight.

Some of them had started to regret it, and before long they were sniping at each other.

"Evan was doing just fine. You people had to go and switch."

"You've got some nerve saying that. You're the one who started it, saying it was unfair that Evan charged for the food."

My private account was still in the group, so they had no idea it was me.

That was why they kept passing the blame around, each one telling the next to go coax me back.

And just as they were all getting ready to call me, Geoff finally surfaced.

"It's eleven now. We're getting started on lunch here. Sit tight, everyone."

That one line set off a wave of them, voice messages rolling in one after another.

"Isn't it three meals a day? How is it lunch already?"

"We're old. We can't go without breakfast!"

"Evan never treated us like this."

After that message, the group went quiet for a long while.

They regretted it, that much was obvious. To me it was just funny.

Because last winter, when the roads were icy and hard to walk, I'd carried breakfast out at eight in the morning against a freezing wind and arrived ten minutes later than usual.

And this crowd of old folks turned on me, all of them saying I couldn't wait for them to die.

I tried to calm them down for the longest time, and it did no good. In the end Mrs. Swanson cracked me on the temple with her cane and the blood came right away.

Not one of them tried to comfort me. They just watched me, cold-eyed, while she spat on the ground and said, "Serves you right."

My heart felt like it had been carved out and left in the wind, and in the end I pressed a hand to my forehead and went to a nearby hospital to get it bandaged.

Calling the police did nothing.

They were long past the age where anyone could hold them accountable. They'd just sit down on the ground, slap their thighs, and start wailing, and whoever came couldn't do a thing about them.

Back then I already wanted out of this thankless job I was paying for out of my own pocket.

But the moment I brought it up, they were crying and carrying on again, taking turns kneeling at my door for a solid two weeks straight.

They had me pegged: a young man living alone, with no one to back him up.

Even the neighbors started looking at me strangely, and that was when it hit me that getting on a sinking ship is easy, but getting off is hard.

Thinking about it, I gripped my phone.

I couldn't just sit here and take it. Once Geoff stopped caring for them, they'd come right back to make my life miserable.

Then an idea came to me. I edited together clips of myself caring for them day to day, cooking their meals, and posted it online.

I didn't spare the money either, sinking ten thousand into promoting it. Fifteen minutes after I posted, it blew up. Plenty of people praised me for being a good man, and some called me a bleeding heart.

But that wasn't what I was after. Not until someone reached out to me.

They wanted me to be an in-home nutritionist for an elderly man, five visits a week to cook, fifty thousand a month.

I looked the old man up right away, and once I'd confirmed he had power and connections, I said yes without a second's hesitation.

I had money, but no power. In the eyes of those thirteen old people, I was nothing more than a golden hen.

Now I'd found a big tree to lean on. So what would become of them?

I went to open the group chat, only to find that after my good buddy delivered lunch, the whole thing had blown up.