The moment Ethan said, “Babe, after the wedding, we’ll move into your condo and rent mine out. It’ll pay my mom’s car loan,” I realized he had stopped pretending our marriage was about us. He grinned like he had solved a puzzle whose missing piece was my bank account.
We were eating takeout on the balcony of my condo, twenty floors above downtown Chicago. I had bought it three years earlier, before meeting him, after a decade of saving, investing, and working brutal hours as a forensic accountant. No family money. No inheritance. Just discipline.
I had spent years tracing fraud for people who smiled across conference tables while burying liabilities in footnotes. Ethan knew my job title but treated it like boring office work. He never understood that my career rested on one rule: when the numbers and the story disagree, believe the numbers.
I set down my wineglass.
