We didn’t have much, but we didn’t worry about it. Life seemed easy for a long time, as if the future would just sort itself out.
Then came the children: first a daughter, and two years later, a son.
We bought a house in the suburbs and went on vacation once a year—usually somewhere we could drive to, with the kids asking, “Are we there yet?”
Everything was so normal that I didn’t even notice the lies until it was too late.
We had been married for 35 years when I noticed money missing from our joint account.
Our son had sent us some money—a partial repayment of a loan we’d given him three years earlier. I logged into the account to transfer it to savings, just as I always did.
The balance nearly gave me a heart attack.
The deposit was there, of course. But the account balance was still thousands of dollars lower than it should have been.
I scrolled down and saw that several transfers had been made over the last few months.
“This can’t be right.”
