“Why?”
“Because cruises are expensive. Especially last-minute bookings for three people. Suites, drink packages.”
I opened the banking app. The face ID took a moment to resolve, as though my phone also needed a second to recognize the woman currently holding it.
The balance was forty-two dollars and fifty cents.
Three days ago it had been over five thousand dollars. Money we were saving toward a down payment on a house. Money my father had left me when he died eighteen months earlier, which I had kept separate in my mind as something that meant more than its numerical value, a small piece of continued presence from a man I had loved and lost.
I sat down in the kitchen chair across from Victor and looked at the screen until the numbers resolved into something my brain could accept as real. Then I looked at the man across from me. He was watching me with the steady attention of someone who has already processed his own version of this, has been sitting with it for longer than I had, and has arrived at the other side of the shock into something harder and more useful.
“He took everything,” I said. “He left me here in a cold house with no food and no money, to care for a man he told me was dying, while he goes on a vacation with the woman he told me didn’t matter.”
“He didn’t just leave you,” Victor said. “He discarded both of us. He thinks I’m a burden waiting to expire, and he thinks you’re a doormat waiting to be walked on.” He set his water glass down with a deliberate sound. “The question is whether we’re going to prove him right.”
I looked at Victor, really looked at him, for the first time. Brady had described him to me over five years of marriage with the language of diminishment, senile, lost, basically gone, not worth the trouble of a real conversation. The man sitting across from me was frail and obviously ill, but his mind was entirely present, moving behind his eyes with the focused clarity of someone who has been thinking carefully about an unjust situation for a long time and has been waiting, with the patience of a former accountant, for the right moment and the right witness.
“No,” I said. “We deserve better than this.”
