While I lay there, I logged into our joint bank account on my phone. The twelve hundred dollars was still labeled car repairs. But now, with nothing to do but stare at a small screen in a hospital room while my husband was in the corner chair ignoring me, I noticed something I had missed before. Small ATM withdrawals, sixty dollars at a time, from a machine in Florence, Kentucky. We did not live in Florence. We did not shop in Florence. I did not know a single person in Florence. The withdrawals went back four months with the regularity of a subscription payment.
I did not sleep that night.
Around six in the morning, the door opened. The doctor came in, and behind him were two people I had never seen: a woman in scrubs who introduced herself as the hospital’s patient advocate, and a woman in a dark blazer with a badge on her belt. The doctor pulled a chair close to my bed and sat down, and I knew, because doctors do not pull up chairs for good news, that what came next would require me to be sitting still.
