The Debt Collector Part IV: The Interest Rate
Mara couldn’t breathe.
Not in the dramatic, hyperventilating way that people in thrillers did, but in the quiet, terrifying way where your body just forgets how. Like something inside had shut off the lights and thrown away the keys.
She was sitting on the floor of her apartment, surrounded by boxes of her mother’s life. Paper stacks. Receipts. Yellowed envelopes that crumbled when touched. Mara had been sifting through them for hours. Looking for an answer. Looking for why.
What did Delores Ellison buy that was worth this?
The restraining order against Caleb. The letter in Mara’s own handwriting. The dates. It was all connected. It had to be. Her mother hadn’t just bartered her years. She had made a trade. A filthy, desperate one.
Mara picked up a manila envelope with a bent corner and opened it slowly. Inside, a series of doctor’s notes, handwritten and barely legible. Notes from therapists. A psychiatrist. A list of prescriptions she didn’t remember her mother taking.
Then a single sheet, stark and official.
“Patient displays obsessive behavior. Fixated on a past trauma involving her daughter and a male family friend. No record of official charges. Strong belief in having made a supernatural bargain to ‘protect her child.’ Recommending further evaluation.”
It was dated six months before the restraining order.
Mara stared at it until the edges blurred.
So her mother had made a deal.
Not a metaphor. Not a coping mechanism.
A real, binding, blood-signed, soul-leased deal.
And Mara was the balloon payment.
She didn’t want to sleep.
Every night brought more slippage. Time missing. Items misplaced. Voices just out of range. Whispers on the phone. Photos in her camera roll that she hadn’t taken.
Her face looked different in each one. A little more tired. A little less there.
She turned on the TV, just for noise.
Claudine appeared again.
This time in full color, sitting at a table in what looked like a 1970s office building. Faded wallpaper. A rotary phone next to her. She was sipping something dark from a cracked mug that read Pay On Time.
“Mara,” Claudine said, smiling with all her teeth. “You’ve been busy.”
“You knew,” Mara said.
“Of course.”
“You knew what she did. What she gave up.”
Claudine placed the mug down gently. “She did what many parents have done. She spent time she didn’t have to keep her child safe. It’s admirable.”
“She paid for him to disappear.”
Claudine tilted her head. “Paid for what could have happened to stop being real.”
Mara blinked.
“What?”
Claudine leaned forward.
“She paid to rewrite the threat. She didn’t just want Caleb gone. She wanted what could have happened to be unwritten. That sort of editing requires more than years. It requires memory. Context. Foundation.”
“You’re saying I don’t remember because—”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
Claudine smiled again.
“Until the interest matured.”
Mara dreamed of stairs that night. Endless. Made of teeth. Each one ground down to a nub. A child’s voice whispered a nursery rhyme backwards. She kept falling up, over and over, until she woke with her legs cramped and her pillow soaked through.
She found a notebook next to her on the bed.
It was hers.
She flipped through it.
Page after page of entries.
Names. Symbols. Frantic writing.
One entry stood out.
“They aren’t just taking time. They’re taking the meaning of the time. If you gave a child a memory and then erased the context, would it still count? That’s what she did. She paid to blur it all. And now it’s sharpening again.”
At the bottom of the page, in block letters:
“SHE BOUGHT YOU SILENCE. BUT SILENCE ACCRUES INTEREST.”
By morning, she couldn’t remember the name of her fourth-grade teacher.
It was a small thing. Trivial.
But it unraveled her.
She remembered the classroom. The color of the carpet. The way the chalk squeaked. But not the woman who stood at the front of it every day for a year.
She called a friend. A childhood friend.
Angela.
Angela answered, groggy.
“Hey, sorry,” Mara said. “Weird question.”
“Shoot.”
“Who was our fourth-grade teacher?”
Silence.
Angela exhaled slowly.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No,” Angela said, voice tight. “And I don’t like that I don’t.”
The line crackled.
“Do you remember Caleb?” Mara asked quietly.
Angela hung up.
Mara walked the city like a ghost that afternoon. Nothing felt real. The buildings looked flat. People moved like puppets. A child ran past her chasing a balloon, and for a second, Mara saw the balloon as an eyeball. Just floating.
She turned the corner and nearly screamed.
The figure from the photo.
Too tall. Too still.
Standing in front of a church door.
It looked at her.
Its head didn’t move. Its body didn’t shift. But Mara felt its attention slide over her like a wet cloth pulled across skin.
She ran.
That night, she met Greenwife again.
Not by choice.
She woke up in the dark hallway. The one behind her apartment door. The wallpaper peeled in curls. The lights buzzed like insects dying.
She opened the door at the end with the brass key.
Greenwife waited behind the desk. She was sewing something into a page with black thread. The page whimpered softly.
Mara stepped forward.
“You erased him from me.”
Greenwife didn’t look up.
“Your mother did.”
“You twisted my life to hide one man’s sickness.”
Greenwife smiled. “We twisted nothing. We simply curved the ledger.”
Mara slammed her fists on the desk.
“I want out.”
Greenwife gestured to the trees outside the window. They were hung with objects — not fruit. Not faces this time.
Moments.
You could feel them.
First steps. First heartbreaks. Apologies never spoken. Laughter in cheap cars. A sister who died young. A friend who stayed just long enough to save you.
Mara’s breath caught.
“They’re not dead,” she whispered.
Greenwife nodded once.
“They’re owed.”
Mara turned to leave.
Her hand touched the doorknob.
And she was home.
The ledger was open on the kitchen table.
A new entry blinked in.
Interest Applied: 3 Months, 2 Weeks, 6 Days
Her fingers twitched.
Her phone buzzed.
A photo appeared.
Her mother, sitting on a hospital bed, holding baby Mara.
Behind her, a shadow.
The shape of a man.
Eyes scratched out.