Chapter 18: The Weight of the Real
The glow of helping Val with her grant application lasted through the weekend, a bright, steady flame in Liam's chest. It was a new kind of high, one born not from personal gain, but from shared purpose. For a few days, the boulder felt less like a burden and more like a shared project.
But reality, like a margin call, always arrives.
It came on a Tuesday evening in the form of a phone call from his mother. Her voice was thin, strained, the cheerful facade she usually maintained for him cracking at the edges.
"Liam, honey. I know you're busy…"
"Mom, what's wrong?" The familiar cold knot tightened in his stomach.
"It's nothing, really. Just… the car. The transmission, they say. The estimate is twenty-two hundred dollars." She tried to laugh, a hollow, broken sound. "Of course it is. I can take the bus for a while, it's just… inconvenient."
*Inconvenient.* The word was a dagger. The bus would turn her already long days into marathons of exhaustion. It was a tangible step down, a visible tear in the fragile fabric of their stability. The hundred dollars he'd sent her was a band-aid on a gushing wound. His paper trading profits, his meticulously maintained risk-to-reward ratios, his entire "Climb"—it was all theoretical, a beautiful, intricate sandcastle facing the rising tide of a very real financial ocean.
The call ended with his weak assurances that they would "figure it out." He sat in the darkening silence of his dorm room, the charts on his screen suddenly looking like children's drawings. What was a 2% gain on a $50,000 paper account? A thousand simulated dollars. It wouldn't even cover the towing fee.
The old, gnawing desperation began to creep back in, colder and sharper now. It was one thing to lose his own inheritance. It was another to stand by, powerless, while his mother's life grew smaller and harder. Val's grant application, a quest for $5,000 to fund a beautiful dream, now felt like a painful juxtaposition. He was fighting for survival; she was fighting for expression.
He opened a live trading account, not the paper one. He stared at the login screen, his finger hovering over the keyboard. He had $1,137.62 in his checking account—the sum total of his warehouse labor, every brick he'd laid since the fall. It was emergency money. Rent money. Food money.
The siren song of leverage whispered to him. A few hundred dollars. A single, good trade on a volatile forex pair with 30:1 leverage. He wouldn't be greedy. Just enough to cover the car repair. He could fix this. He could be the hero.
He pulled up the GBP/JPY, the "widow-maker" pair, known for its violent, unpredictable swings. It was coiling, looking ready for a breakout. His old self, the gambler, saw a rocket ship. His new self, the disciple of discipline, saw a minefield.
His heart hammered in his chest, a frantic drumbeat of fear and temptation. This was the true test. Not in a simulated environment, but here, with real stakes. With his mother's well-being on the line. This was the weight of the real.
He remembered the zero. The absolute, soul-crushing void of it. He remembered Ben's voice: *"the dumbest trade I've ever seen."*
Taking this trade wouldn't be a step on the climb. It would be leaping off the mountain.
With a groan that was ripped from the core of him, he slammed the laptop shut. The sound echoed in the silent room. He had stopped himself. He had chosen discipline over desperation. But the victory felt hollow, ashes in his mouth. He had preserved his $1,137.62, but his mother still had a broken car. The climb was still too slow. The mountain was still too high.
He put his head in his hands, the weight of the real pressing down on him, heavier than any boulder. He was doing everything right, and it wasn't enough. The system was sound, but the world was broken. And for the first time in a long time, sitting alone in the dark, he felt the cold, chilling touch of true despair.