I felt a knot in my stomach as I went over the numbers again.
There was no mistake. Thousands of dollars were missing.
***
That night, I brought my laptop over to Troy while he was watching the news.
He barely looked up from the TV. “I paid the bills.”
“How much?”
“A few thousand. It all balances out.”
“Where?” I turned the screen toward him.
He rubbed his forehead, his gaze fixed on the TV. “The usual stuff… household things, bills. Sometimes I move money around—you know how it is. It’ll come back.”
I wanted to press him, but after a lifetime of knowing him, I knew that an argument right then would only create more obstacles.
So, I’d wait.
A week later, the remote control ran out of batteries in the middle of a show I was watching. I went to Troy’s desk to look for replacements.
I opened the drawer and found a neat stack of hotel receipts beneath some old mail.
Troy traveled to California every now and then, so I didn’t worry—until I saw that the hotel was in Massachusetts.
