The money is in our savings,” I said. “Exactly where it belongs.”
The mortgage payment was one thousand four hundred sixty dollars.
For forty-eight months, that sum had left our joint checking account on the twenty-ninth of every month, landing in my mother’s credit union account just in time for the automatic debit on the first.
“Ryan is asking if there was a technical glitch,” I said. “He wants to know if he needs to call the bank branch in Charlotte to sort it out.”
“Let him call them,” George said. “They won’t tell him anything anyway. His name isn’t on your checking account.”
“He thinks it is a computer error,” I said. “He wrote that the credit union told Mom she has until the end of the week before they charge a late fee.”
“She has forty-eight hours,” George said. “They always have a grace period.”
I locked the screen, and the kitchen went quiet again.
The only sound was the drip of the kitchen faucet and the distant rumble of the morning garbage truck three streets over.
“Are you going to tell him?” George asked.
“Not over a text,” I said.
The drive down Interstate seventy-seven had been a slow, gray crawl.
The morning commute was always heavy near the Tyvola Road exit, the brake lights of the cars ahead reflecting off the wet asphalt from an early morning drizzle.
I parked my black SUV in the back corner of the office lot, where the asphalt met a row of low loblolly pines.
The smell of cold coffee from the travel mug in my console hung in the humid air of the cabin.
I sat with the engine running for a minute, looking at my hands on the steering wheel.
I tapped my gold wedding band against the leather grip, the quiet click-click-click matching the rhythm of the windshield wipers.
I reached into my red leather purse on the passenger seat and pulled out my phone.
There were five new missed calls now.
Three were from Ryan, one was from a number I did not recognize, and one was from Aunt Patricia’s landline in Cherryville.
