Then came the money.
Leo suggested we combine accounts two years into the marriage. Simpler, he said. We’re a team. I earn forty-two thousand six hundred dollars a year as a billing coordinator, not a fortune but real money earned by processing invoices and arguing on the phone with pet insurance companies. And somehow there was never enough left over. I would check our balance and it would be lower than the math supported. I mentioned it once. Leo told me I was bad with numbers, which remains genuinely funny given that I process medical billing claims for a living and have not miscoded one in three years.
Now I know where the money went.
Five months before the driveway, my body began sending messages I could not ignore. Tingling in my feet after work, every night like static. Leo said I was sitting wrong at my desk. Fatigue that arrived like a wall, leaving me sleeping straight through to dinner. Freya heard about it and told Leo that young women these days had no stamina. A blurred vision episode at work, the screen going soft for forty seconds before clearing, scared me enough that I tried to book a doctor’s appointment, at which point I discovered that Leo had forgotten to add me to his health insurance after switching jobs four months earlier. He said he would handle it. Weeks passed. He did not handle it.
