Loved it - been catching up with the series over the last week (had about 50 chapters to cover) so thanks for brightening the start of the new year! As a pretty solid Will/Zach stan I admired how deftly you undermined my support for Zach (I always liked his ruthlessness, and understood why he kinda had to keep choosing football over Will beyond just love of the game - it’s the only mechanism he had to be on a social/financial level with Will by his own efforts - can’t imagine Zach ever being a kept man). Anyway, he was abusive and Will drew his red line immediately with me cheering (literally the only thing I hate about Will is his willingness to continue sleeping/consorting with a rapist - I appreciate he has feelings for Patrick and it’s difficult to switch those off, but that whole situation is still a massive ick for me). Interested in whether there’s any specific reason behind Zach’s sudden rages (you drop so many Chekhov’s guns I never have any idea which is about to go off).
Kinda glad these ones were the most recent chapters as I get to comment on them still fresh and have fucking loved them. Curious about a couple of things at the moment:
The Insurance Policy
How the insurance policy came to be - Curtis Buck (a man who clearly intended to live forever) taking out a policy and paying premiums in the last, financially straitened year of his life? At the very least it looks sus enough for an insurance company to spend a LONG time investigating
Does the fact that Zach appears to have known about this focus suspicion onto him - we only have his word that Taylor killed Curtis, and that Taylor chose her relationship with Curtis over her relationship with him. It’s an unlikely an high-risk strategy, but at the moment it looks like his rival for Taylor (a man he hated, a girl he loves) is dead, and he’s guilted Travis/Will (and by extension Will’s family) into both helping covering up the murder and paying out a $100m insurance policy that might be difficult or impossible for Taylor/Big to claim
Slightly confused by Will’s willingness to go in on the insurance payout with Travis - I appreciate family/honour/protecting the people he loves are immeasurably more important to him than money, but it’s a huge amount, and the decision seems to have been made so quickly and easily by him? Particularly when idk how big the genuine risk to Zach/Travis is
At the very least, I’d imagine some hard-nosed negotiating is possible - given the relative weakness of Taylor/Big’s position I’d imagine an immediate payment of considerably less than the theoretically possible $100m insurance would buy them off
The CCTV
Seems weird that Jake would plan his assault so meticulously, and forget about/ignore the risk of it being recorded
Would also seem to be mutually assured destruction: Big/Taylor potentially having concrete evidence of Jake’s assaulting Curtis, but then having to deny (somehow) that the tape was running when Curtis was murdered (which, if Zach is telling the truth, would prove Taylor guilty of a far more significant crime)
Having just got everyone’s late night/instinctive responses to the situation in this chapter, I’m curious to see how things pan out when it gets more calculating in the morning! (Loving your work, as ever, and braced for the inevitable 15 more twists before this is all resolved ❤️)
