I am sorry I did not tell you sooner. I was tired, Eugene. Tired in my body, tired in my soul, and ashamed of how badly our son had learned to treat love as something he could spend.

I lowered the letter. “How much?”

Carol reached beneath the side table and pulled out another folder. “Helen gathered records.”

I opened it. Bank statements. Copies of checks. Withdrawal slips. Transfer confirmations. My name appeared again and again beneath signatures that looked convincing at a glance — but once I saw the pattern, every one of them turned my stomach.

Seventy thousand dollars from my retirement account. Twenty-seven thousand from savings. Several smaller withdrawals from an emergency fund I’d nearly forgotten existed.

Ninety-seven thousand dollars. Money I had earned through early mornings at construction sites, standing in the rain with inspectors, answering work calls during dinner, solving everyone else’s structural problems while my own family quietly collapsed around me.