Her account was wiped clean, her boyfriend had vanished, and the only thing left was an empty glass of Pinot Noir and an unthinkable plan.
Writer’s Prompt
Julie Darling stared at the ATM, then at her slip. Her balance was zero. A cold panic crept over her the way the tide swallows the shore—slow, unstoppable, absolute. She called Bob, her boyfriend of six months. Straight to voicemail. She dialed his office; the receptionist informed her he had resigned last Friday. She didn’t need to go back to their apartment. The closet would already be bare. Julie pressed the paper receipt to her trembling lips and whispered to the empty street, “Why did I give him the password?”
Three hours later, the panic had hardened into a sharp, bitter rage over a bottle of cheap Pinot Noir. Across the table, her friend Ann leaned forward, dark eyes glittering beneath the bistro’s low amber lights.
“Don’t call the police,” Ann whispered, her voice dropping an octave. “They’ll file a report, shrug, and let him burn through your life savings in Mexico. We track him down ourselves. And we give him a double dose of his own medicine.”
Ann tapped her phone screen, turning it toward Julie. A live GPS tracker blinked over a motel downtown. “I never trusted his grin, Jules. I slipped a beacon under his spare tire weeks ago. I’ve got his location, a friend in digital forensics who can mirror his accounts, and two seats in my car. We don’t just take your money back—we take his, too.”
Julie’s heart hammered against her ribs. The screen pulsed with the little red dot. She could walk out, call the bank, accept the ruinous loss, and start over. Or she could slide into Ann’s passenger seat and cross a line she could never walk back from.
Her hand hovered over the table, fingers twitching toward Ann’s keys.
What happens next? Does Julie snatch the keys and seek vengeance, or pull back from the edge? How would you finish Julie’s story?
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