Chapter 5: The Account
I waited until I heard the front door close.
Then I waited another five minutes.
Then I opened my banking app.
The joint wedding account had been opened with an initial deposit of four thousand dollars — two from me, two from Brandon.
Over eight months, I had added to it steadily.
Every month, automatic transfer, two hundred and fifty dollars from my paycheck.
Brandon had matched it twice in the beginning, then stopped.
I hadn't pushed.
I had told myself he was between freelance contracts.
The balance on the screen read forty-one dollars and seventeen cents.
I sat very still.
Lily was watching me from across the table.
She saw my face.
"Mom.
What is it?"
I turned the phone around and showed her.
She stared at the screen.
"That's — where did it go?"
"I don't know yet."
I went to the transaction history.
The withdrawals had started in November.
Small ones at first — two hundred here, three hundred there.
Then larger.
Five hundred in January.
Eight hundred in February.
A single withdrawal of two thousand, three hundred dollars in March, six days after I had made my last deposit.
Every withdrawal had been made by Brandon.
The account had been nearly emptied while I was choosing wedding invitations.
I called my bank.
I was on hold for eleven minutes.
When a representative finally answered, I explained the situation in as few words as possible and asked what my options were.
She told me that because both names were on the account, either party could withdraw funds legally.
She told me I could close the account and remove his access, which I did immediately, on the phone, while Lily sat across from me and watched.
Forty-one dollars and seventeen cents.
I closed it.
Then I called my mother.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Nicole.
How are you feeling?
Are you home?
Did Brandon —"
"Mom." I stopped her.
"I need to tell you some things.
Are you sitting down?"
A pause.
"I'm sitting."
I told her about the bedroom.
About Kayla.
About the ring.
About Diane's phone call, the emergency contact form, the Christmas party.
About the account.
My mother did not say a word through any of it.
When I finished, the silence on the line lasted long enough that I checked to make sure the call hadn't dropped.
Then she said, very quietly: "How long has Kayla been doing this."
"Six months.
That's what she told me."
Another silence.
"Your father's birthday," my mother said.
"She brought Brandon to your father's birthday dinner in October.
She sat next to him.
She kept touching his arm." A pause.
"I thought she was just being affectionate.
I thought —" Her voice broke.
Just slightly.
"I should have seen it."
"Mom —"
"I should have seen it." Firmer now.
"Nicole, I am coming over."
"You don't have to —"
"I am coming over right now."
She arrived twenty-two minutes later.
She came through the door with a bag of groceries she must have grabbed on the way, set it on the kitchen counter without a word, and then crossed the room and put both arms around me very carefully — careful of my ribs — and held on.
I didn't cry.
I hadn't cried yet.
I wasn't sure when that would happen or what would break it loose.
My mother pulled back and looked at my face.
Then she looked at Lily.
"Are you all right?" she asked Lily.
"I'm okay, Grandma."
"You're not okay.
Neither of you are okay.
That's fine." She turned back to the counter and started unpacking the groceries.
"We're going to eat something and then we're going to figure out what comes next."
She made soup.
The three of us sat at the kitchen table and ate it.
Outside, the afternoon light shifted slowly toward evening.
My phone buzzed.
A text from Kayla.
*We need to talk.
You didn't let me explain.
There's a lot you don't understand about what happened between Brandon and me.*
I read it.
I set the phone face-down on the table.
My mother looked at the phone.
She looked at me.
"Kayla?" she said.
"Yes."
She picked up her spoon.
"Eat your soup."
I ate my soup.
May you like
But twenty minutes later, another message came through — this one from Brandon.
And what it said made me push back from the table.
