“Alexa?” Morgan.

“What’s up, Morgs? I’m in the middle of something.”

“Who’s in there?”

“No one’s in here.”

“I thought you were talking to someone.”

Come on, thought Alexa. She just wanted to make her video and get on with her day. “It was just an audiobook,” she said. Alexa had never listened to an audiobook in her life, nor did she plan to.

“Can I come in?”

“No.” Too sharp, but she couldn’t help it.

“Why not?”

“I’m doing something important. Where’s Mom?”

“I don’t know.” Morgan’s voice was plaintive. “She’s not home. She didn’t leave a note.”

“Text her.”

“I did. She didn’t answer yet.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine for a little while.” Alexa couldn’t help the note of exasperation that crept into her voice.

From outside the door came Morgan’s irritated little huff. “Why can’t you be nicer, Alexa? Like you used to be?”

Alexa winced. “I’m nice!” she told the door. “I’m nice all the time.”

“No you’re not. Not anymore.”

The truth was, Alexa hadn’t been all that nice to Morgan lately, really not since Peter died. Morgan’s grief had seemed so separate from her own—in many ways so much cleaner, so much more deserved and allowed, that Alexa felt herself bumping up against it again and again. Unable to help herself.

“I’ll be down in a few,” she added, more softly. Picturing Morgan’s sad little face, hearing her raspy, innocent voice, brought to the forefront an uncomfortable question.

Alexa’s biological father was “no longer in the picture”—a euphemism employed by Alexa’s mother and adopted by Alexa her self, even though she knew that the truth behind those words was darker and more ominous. A raging alcoholic. Incapable of or unwilling to seek rehabilitation. A danger to himself and others. No longer in the picture. Never to be in the picture again.

So Alexa couldn’t help but wonder. If Morgan’s essential goodness came half from Rebecca and half from Peter, where did that leave Alexa? Only half good. Half at the most.

“Give me ten minutes, okay?” She kept most of her videos to under four minutes, because she’d found that that was the sweet spot for holding people’s attention. She always sat in the same chair. She crossed her legs demurely at the ankle, and she aimed the camera so it focused mostly on her face.

“Welcome to Silk Stockings,” she said. “Today we’re going to learn about toxic assets: what they are, and what to do if you find yourself in possession of them.”

She’d been doing Silk Stockings for just about a year now. The seed first sprouted before that, in that dark time after Peter’s death. Those were confusing, unsettling days, when her mother drank a lot of red wine, and Morgan curled up in the living room and reread Harry Potter for the zillionth time. At meals, instead of sitting down and eating something her mother had cooked, as they had in the past, they each foraged in the kitchen and ate standing at the island, or trailed cracker crumbs or shreds of cheese to the television or a corner in which to nurse their melancholy. For her part Alexa found herself watching a lot of YouTube alone in her room.

There were so many videos! And she knew that some of these people were making money from them. She started to pay closer attention. There were videos of people opening boxes and people putting other people to sleep with ASMR whispering; there were people training their dogs and people putting on makeup and taking off makeup and putting makeup on their well-trained dogs and curling hair and straightening hair and baking, sawing, grilling, singing, strumming, arranging, knitting, organizing.

For a while Alexa was intrigued by Hannah Hart, who cooked drunk, but Alexa didn’t like to cook. She definitely didn’t like to cook drunk. (She didn’t even like to eat drunk.) It was around that time that she was taking an Intro to the Stock Market at the high school that she’d chosen as an elective because the teacher, Mr. Bennett, was supposedly an easy grader.

One day she was listening to him talk about bull markets versus bear markets, and idly thinking about how much easier it was to learn from good-looking people, which may be prejudiced or whatever but it was still totally true (Mr. Bennett, for an old person, was not terrible on the eyes), and then it hit her. This could be her entry into YouTube. She could be the pretty girl talking about the stock market.

She made a few videos, explaining terms she’d learned either in class or in Stock Investing for Dummies. Price-to-earnings ratio, bears and bulls, diversification. When she was confident enough in the format, and in her hair, she started posting them to her own channel. Viewers and subscribers followed—more quickly than she’d anticipated. It was sort of embarrassing, how fast and furious they came. Soon she had enough subscribers to apply to the YouTube Partner Program, where advertisers paid to appear on certain channels. She got accepted, and she started earning.

What she made was not insane money by YouTube standards. But it was way more than she made scooping ice cream at the Cottage. It paid for her clothes, which were not cheap, and it allowed her to tuck away a sizable amount each month. For her future.