“A quiet home is a happy home, and a good wife knows when to let things go,” she added.
“He seemed very upset about the three hundred dollars,” I said, watching her hands.
“Money comes and goes, Emily,” Linda said, her fingers returning to her necklace.
“It is not worth making a scene over a few bills.”
“My father left his watch on the counter this morning,” I said quietly.
Linda froze for a second, her hand resting on the edge of the sink, before she picked up a dish towel.
“Your father should mind his own business,” she said.
The house was silent again by one o’clock, with Derek out in the garage and Linda gone to her bridge club.
I sat on the edge of the sofa in the dark living room, where the heavy velvet curtains were drawn against the midday sun.
I unlocked my phone and opened the banking application, typing in my eight-digit passcode with a cold finger.
I bypassed our joint checking account and clicked on the tab for my personal savings.
This was the money I had kept aside since my grandmother died three years ago, a safety net of eight thousand dollars.
The screen loaded slowly, the little blue circle spinning against the white background.
When the page finally cleared, the numbers at the top of the screen did not make sense.
The balance was zero.
There was no eight thousand dollars, only a blank white space where the numbers used to be.
I refreshed the screen three times, thinking it must be a temporary system error or a glitch in the wireless connection.
But the screen did not change, and the balance remained at zero.
“The balance is zero, Derek, and I did not touch it,” I whispered to the empty room.
I scrolled down to the transaction history, but the page was blank, refusing to show where the money had gone.
The glowing phone screen reflected on the blank wall of the dark living room.
By ten past ten the next morning, the glass doors of the Oak Creek Bank had cleared of the morning rush, leaving only the sound of a printer humming behind the counter.
Clara, a teller I had known since high school, adjusted her blue-rimmed glasses and tapped her screen twice.
“The three transactions happened at the drive-through lane,” Clara said, her voice dropping to a low murmur. “Each one used the debit card ending in four-two-one-nine, and the correct personal identification number was entered on the keypad.”
“There must be a second card,” I said.
“Only two cards were ever issued for this account, Emily. Yours and the one we mailed to your home address last year.”
She turned the monitor slightly so I could see the digital ledger. The dates were listed in neat, black columns, showing three separate withdrawals over the past ten days. Each time, the balance had dropped by thousands of dollars until the final line showed a single digit.
