After four years working abroad and sending home nearly a hundred thousand dollars, I came back without warning and found my wife bald, skin and bone, washing dishes in the backyard.<\/p>\n
“That bald woman shouldn’t even be out here when we have visitors!” my sister shouted from the living room, while my wife knelt on the patio, picking up a broken plate.<\/p>\n
I’d just gotten back to Springfield after four years in a cold metalworking shop up in Yellowknife. Nobody knew I was coming.<\/p>\n
The plant had suspended operations for a few weeks after a small fire, and I decided to use the time to surprise my family.<\/p>\n
For four years I’d endured twelve-hour shifts, winters that dropped to twenty below, and an endless rotation of reheated meals.<\/p>\n
Every month I wired between two thousand and twenty-five hundred dollars straight into my mother Margaret’s bank account.<\/p>\n
The money was supposed to build a house, secure our future, and take care of Gwen, my wife.<\/p>\n
All told, I’d sent home more than a hundred thousand dollars.<\/p>\n
When I finally pulled up, I found a beautiful two-story house, a golden front gate, a brand-new SUV, and furniture out of a design magazine.<\/p>\n
I felt a swell of pride at what my work had built \u2014 right up until I walked around back and saw Gwen by the laundry area.<\/p>\n
She was so thin her clothes hung off her like they were draped over a coat rack. She wore a thick wool hat, though the afternoon was warm.<\/p>\n
When she recognized me, she didn’t run over or smile. She huddled against the wall and covered her head with both hands.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I stepped forward and gently lifted the hat off her.<\/p>\n
She had no hair left. Her bare scalp was dotted with tiny red cuts, as if someone had dragged a dull razor across it.<\/p>\n
My mother came out of the house in an expensive silk outfit, heavy gold bracelets, a thick gold chain at her throat.<\/p>\n
Behind her came my sister Paige, holding a new smartphone and a designer handbag, wearing so many rings she could barely bend her fingers.<\/p>\n
“Don’t make a big deal out of this, Gavin,” my mother said, waving a hand. “Gwen used some cheap hair chemicals and it all fell out. And she got obsessed with losing weight on top of it.”<\/p>\n
“She’s just crazy,” Paige added with a sneer. “She lives off your money and still wants everyone’s attention.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Then I noticed a strip of medical tape peeking out under Gwen’s sleeve, and a yellowing bruise where an IV had gone in.<\/p>\n
I wanted to scream, to demand answers on the spot.<\/p>\n
But I realized, standing there, that the house, the accounts, nearly everything, was legally in their names.<\/p>\n
If I confronted them without proof, they could hide the money and pin all of it on Gwen.<\/p>\n
So I told a careful lie.<\/p>\n
“Actually, I came back because my company’s giving me a compensation package and shares worth close to four hundred thousand dollars,” I announced. “I just have to prove I already hold substantial property and investments in my own name here.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The look in both their eyes changed on the spot.<\/p>\n
My mother grabbed my arm with a wide smile. Paige immediately started talking about a custom truck, a luxury spa, a vacation in Miami.<\/p>\n
Later that night, in the damp, gloomy room they’d assigned my wife, Gwen finally spoke. She unbuttoned her blouse and showed me a fresh scar from a surgical biopsy.<\/p>\n
“I have breast cancer, Gavin,” she whispered. “The doctors found the tumor five months ago.”<\/p>\n
She told me how she’d begged my mother for three hundred dollars to see a doctor.<\/p>\n
My mother refused, accused her of inventing illnesses to steal my money, and forbade her from breathing a word to me. Paige monitored her calls to keep her quiet.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
With no money of her own, Gwen had cut off her long hair and sold it to a wig shop for a hundred and fifty dollars \u2014 just enough to cover the bus fare and the biopsy.<\/p>\n
While my mother and sister flashed their jewelry for the neighbors, my wife had sold her own hair to find out whether she was going to die.<\/p>\n
I pulled her into my arms and asked her to hold on a few more days.<\/p>\n
Then I turned off the lamp, stared at the ceiling \u2014 where my mother and sister slept soundly one floor up \u2014 and made up my mind.<\/p>\n
They had no idea what was coming.<\/p>\n
The next morning, I started playing the most heartless husband in the world.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In front of Margaret and Paige, I pretended to be ashamed of how Gwen looked.<\/p>\n
I criticized her appearance, ordered her back into the kitchen, and said that once the four hundred thousand came through, I might just file for divorce.<\/p>\n
Every word scalded my throat on the way out. But the performance worked \u2014 they dropped their guard around me completely.<\/p>\n
That afternoon my mother left her phone unlocked on top of the refrigerator. I tried Paige’s birthday as the passcode, and it opened.<\/p>\n
I found investment accounts totaling seventy thousand dollars. Records of the transfers that bought my sister’s truck.<\/p>\n
Mortgage payments made within days of each of my wire transfers. I photographed every screen.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I also found texts where Paige begged for money \u2014 designer clothes, expensive dinners, truck payments \u2014 and my mother’s replies: “Don’t worry, dear, your brother deposits more on Friday.”<\/p>\n
My grueling labor wasn’t support to them. It was a bottomless account they were sure they controlled.<\/p>\n
Two days later, Paige threw herself a birthday party with a crowd of well-off friends up from Kansas City.<\/p>\n
My mother made Gwen spend the whole day cooking \u2014 smoked pork, roast chicken, salads, three enormous pots of beef stew.<\/p>\n
When a guest asked who the frail woman in the kitchen was, Paige laughed.<\/p>\n
“Oh, that’s just my sister-in-law,” she said. “My brother’s completely sick of supporting her lazy existence.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gwen collapsed by the sink from sheer exhaustion.<\/p>\n
As I carried her to the bed, I quietly recorded the laughter, the insults, and my mother announcing to the room that a sick woman was only good for getting underfoot.<\/p>\n
That evening, I set the last hook.<\/p>\n
I told them my firm in Canada needed proof of assets held solely in my name within seventy-two hours \u2014 otherwise the whole payout would be frozen for a tax audit.<\/p>\n
My mother hesitated. But Paige, obsessed with her dream spa, pushed hard until my mother caved.<\/p>\n
The next morning we drove together to a notary’s office. Paige signed a deed of gift transferring the house back to me, since it had been in her name.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My mother signed the authorization to move all the investment accounts into my primary account.<\/p>\n
The notary read every clause aloud, reviewed each one, and confirmed that every signature was given freely.<\/p>\n
“Once the four hundred thousand lands, we split it evenly, right?” Paige asked, already dreaming out loud.<\/p>\n
At three the next morning, I moved Gwen out of that house.<\/p>\n
I drove her straight to a specialized oncology hospital in Kansas City, where doctors confirmed the tumor was still treatable \u2014 though her severe malnutrition made immediate surgery too dangerous.<\/p>\n
They admitted her to stabilize her vital signs and get food into her body.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Then I completed the transfers and canceled the secondary credit card Paige had been living on.<\/p>\n
That same afternoon, Paige tried to buy an expensive diamond ring at a mall. The card was declined right in front of her wealthy fianc\u00e9, Derek.<\/p>\n
Derek called me twenty times. I didn’t pick up once.<\/p>\n
At nightfall I went back to the house with a lawyer, the notary, and two police officers \u2014 there to keep the peace and head off any confrontation.<\/p>\n
My mother sat in the living room surrounded by printed bank statements. Paige’s makeup was streaked with tears, her expensive dress wrinkled.<\/p>\n
“You robbed us!” Margaret screamed the second I walked in. “Give me back my house and my money!”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I calmly opened my leather folder and laid it all on the glass table: the property deeds, the transfer statements, Gwen’s medical reports, the video from the birthday party.<\/p>\n
Then I pressed play on my phone.<\/p>\n
Before the first clip finished, my mother understood that the truth was only starting to come out.<\/p>\n
On the screen, Paige laughed while Gwen, pale and shaking, struggled to carry a heavy tray. Then my mother’s voice rang out, clear.<\/p>\n
“If she faints again, just leave her in the yard,” the recording said. “She always puts on a show when guests are over.”<\/p>\n
The silence that followed was louder than any scream.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Paige lunged for the phone, but an officer stepped between us.<\/p>\n
My mother looked from the lawyer to the notary, hunting for a loophole.<\/p>\n
“That recording doesn’t prove the money was ever yours!” she shouted. “You sent it because you were a good son, and once it’s deposited, it’s legally mine!”<\/p>\n
I laid out four years of international transfer receipts, my payroll slips, texts where she’d promised to manage my money to build my house, messages where she swore Gwen was being cared for.<\/p>\n
Then I set one small folded paper in front of her.<\/p>\n
It was the receipt from the shop that had bought my wife’s hair for a hundred and fifty dollars.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“While you were hoarding seventy thousand dollars in private investment accounts, Gwen sold her hair to pay for a cancer biopsy,” I said. “Are you going to tell me her hair was a gift to you, too?”<\/p>\n
My mother stared at the floor a moment, then her face hardened again.<\/p>\n
“She was always a weak woman,” she spat. “And you’re my son. Your mother comes first.”<\/p>\n
“Being my mother never gave you the right to let my wife die,” I said.<\/p>\n
Paige let out a shrill, nervous laugh. “You don’t even know she’s really sick! She probably made it all up to steal everything for herself!”<\/p>\n
My lawyer opened the medical folder: diagnostic scans, ultrasound images, pathology reports, records of severe weight loss, urgent surgical recommendations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He also produced a formal criminal complaint Gwen had filed \u2014 for threats, restriction of communication, psychological abuse, and deliberate medical neglect.<\/p>\n
My mother went white. “A police complaint? Against your own family?”<\/p>\n
“My family was the woman who waited four years for me,” I said. “You just used our blood as a license to steal my labor and humiliate my wife.”<\/p>\n
Seeing her defense collapse, Margaret dropped to her knees, weeping, and grabbed both my hands.<\/p>\n
“Gavin, my dear boy, I only wanted to secure Paige’s future!” she begged. “A young woman needs assets so her husband respects her \u2014 but you’re a strong man, you can go back to work and earn it all again!”<\/p>\n
That one sentence killed whatever affection I had left.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’d spent four years sleeping in a cramped trailer with six other men, working through fevers, wearing worn-out boots to save a few dollars, spending holidays staring at a phone.<\/p>\n
To my mother, all of it could simply be done again, because I was a man. To Paige, my sweat was an unlimited credit card.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t take one thing that belonged to either of you,” I said. “This house was built with my earnings. The investments came from my paychecks. And you signed the transfer forms of your own free will, because you were greedy for four hundred thousand more.”<\/p>\n
Paige started to cry in real panic. “My wedding is in less than a month! What am I supposed to tell Derek \u2014 he expects this house as part of the settlement!”<\/p>\n
“Tell him the truth,” I said. “Tell him you claimed the wealth your brother earned with his hands while you let your sick sister-in-law starve.”<\/p>\n
The notary confirmed the property donation had been entirely voluntary, that every legal consequence had been explained, and that the deed transfer was already moving through the county records office.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My lawyer added that any challenge they mounted would fail against the evidence \u2014 the financial trail, the written deception, the documented abuse.<\/p>\n
I didn’t want to turn the night into a spectacle, so I gave them three days to pack their clothes and personal belongings.<\/p>\n
I also made it clear they were barred from approaching or contacting Gwen. The officers handed them temporary protection orders.<\/p>\n
My mother glared at me with pure hatred as I turned to go. “The whole town will know you threw out the mother who gave you life!” she screamed after me.<\/p>\n
“And they’ll learn exactly why,” I said.<\/p>\n
Over the next three days, Margaret worked the phones \u2014 uncles, cousins, neighbors, our pastor \u2014 telling anyone who’d listen that Gwen had put a dark spell on me, that a manipulative woman had torn our family apart.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
She didn’t expect me to break my silence.<\/p>\n
I gathered the extended family in the courtyard \u2014 not to humiliate anyone, but because my mother’s version was already spreading.<\/p>\n
I laid out the wire receipts, the bank statements, the medical records, and a short clip from the birthday video.<\/p>\n
My Aunt Brenda, who’d spent years admiring my mother’s gold, covered her mouth.<\/p>\n
“Margaret, did you really know that poor girl had cancer and wouldn’t give her even bus fare?” she asked, horrified.<\/p>\n
My mother feebly claimed Gwen was exaggerating. But our neighbor, Mrs. Jenkins, spoke up from the front gate.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I saw that girl walking miles down the hot road because she had no bus fare,” she said. “I saw her come home with her head shaved, and when I asked, Paige told me it was punishment for being lazy.”<\/p>\n
The whole web came apart right there, in front of everyone.<\/p>\n
On the fourth day, Margaret and Paige packed and moved into a small rented room near the regional bus station.<\/p>\n
They took their clothes, their IDs, and their own jewelry. I had no interest in matching the cruelty they’d shown.<\/p>\n
Their lavish life stopped overnight.<\/p>\n
Paige quickly learned that Derek was nothing like the devoted partner he’d played \u2014 he called off the wedding the moment he understood there’d be no house, no spa, no fortune attached to her name.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When she accused him of being a gold digger, he shot back that she’d lied about her family’s wealth from the start.<\/p>\n
My mother went to the bank to access the investment accounts, only to be reminded by the officials and their legal advisors that she had signed those assets away of her own free will.<\/p>\n
But the harshest part wasn’t losing the money. It was waking up in a world where no one catered to them.<\/p>\n
My mother took a job cooking meals on commission.<\/p>\n
Paige worked long shifts at the front desk of a beauty salon, finally learning how hard it was to earn the money they’d once thrown away without a thought.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Gwen was fighting for her survival.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For ten straight days in the hospital, she took intravenous fluids, nutritional supplements, and specialized care.<\/p>\n
I stayed by her bed every day, though she still flinched whenever a nurse touched her arm.<\/p>\n
The damage ran deep \u2014 she’d been trained to ask permission just to eat, to sleep, to use a phone.<\/p>\n
One quiet night she looked up at me with wet eyes. “You’re really not angry that I kept my illness from you so long?” she asked.<\/p>\n
Shame washed over me.<\/p>\n
“I’m the one who should be asking your forgiveness,” I said, holding her hand. “I left you alone for years and let myself believe comfortable lies, because it was easier than facing the truth.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Your mother told me that if I called you, you’d quit your job up in Canada \u2014 and it would be my fault if we lost the house,” Gwen admitted.<\/p>\n
“No house on earth is worth more than your life,” I told her.<\/p>\n
Once she was stable enough, the surgeons removed the tumor and tested her lymph nodes.<\/p>\n
The days of waiting in hospital hallways were terrifying, but I was no longer helpless or far away. I was right there \u2014 to hold her hand, pay every bill, sit with the specialists.<\/p>\n
The pathology came back better than we’d feared: the cancer hadn’t spread to the surrounding tissue.<\/p>\n
She’d still need chemotherapy and regular monitoring, but her odds of a full recovery were high. Gwen wept with relief when the oncologist told us.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The months that followed were brutal \u2014 waves of nausea, deep fatigue, sleepless nights, mornings when she couldn’t bear to look in the mirror.<\/p>\n
I learned to cook nourishing broths, keep track of a tangle of medications, and sit quietly with her when there was nothing useful to say.<\/p>\n
I sold the luxury truck Paige had bought with my money and put every dollar toward Gwen’s treatment and a small, cozy home in Kansas City, far from the memories.<\/p>\n
I resigned from the job in Yellowknife and used my savings to start a metal fabrication shop with my old high school friend, Wyatt Cooper.<\/p>\n
We earned less than I’d made up north, but I came home every evening, ate dinner with my wife, and was there.<\/p>\n
The legal case against Margaret and Paige didn’t end in prison.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gwen wasn’t after revenge \u2014 she wanted protection, an acknowledgment of harm, and a guarantee of safety.<\/p>\n
The court settlement set permanent restraining orders, mandatory counseling for both of them, and restitution for the traceable medical costs.<\/p>\n
Six months on, my mother came to the workshop.<\/p>\n
She arrived in plain clothes, no gold, her hair tied back, her hands worn from long hours in kitchens.<\/p>\n
For the first time in my life, she looked fragile instead of commanding.<\/p>\n
“I’m not here to ask for the house or the money,” she said quietly. “I only came to ask whether Gwen is all right.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“She’s recovering well,” I said.<\/p>\n
My mother cried silent tears.<\/p>\n
“I told myself your money was mine because I raised you,” she admitted. “Then I decided Paige deserved more because she was younger. And when Gwen got sick, I was so afraid of spending what I thought was mine that every wrong choice came easier than the last.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t hug her. I didn’t shout.<\/p>\n
“Admitting your greed doesn’t undo the damage,” I said.<\/p>\n
“I know,” she whispered. “Do you think she could ever forgive me?”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“That’s her choice to make, not mine.”<\/p>\n
Gwen agreed to read a letter my mother wrote, though she wouldn’t meet in person.<\/p>\n
In it, my mother asked for nothing \u2014 no money, no property.<\/p>\n
She admitted the whole campaign of intimidation and isolation, and for the first time she named Gwen’s cancer without calling it a lie.<\/p>\n
Paige took much longer. For months she cast herself as the victim of a family betrayal.<\/p>\n
Only after a coworker sold her own phone to afford her child’s medicine did Paige finally see what it meant to mock a dying woman.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Eventually she sent Gwen a short text: “I’m sorry I called you a burden when I was the one living off Gavin’s work.”<\/p>\n
Gwen chose not to reply. Forgiveness doesn’t require reopening a door to the people who took away your sense of safety. Sometimes healing starts by building a boundary that never gets crossed again.<\/p>\n
A full year after I came home, Gwen finished her last round of treatment. The oncologist confirmed there was no evidence of disease left in her body.<\/p>\n
One bright morning, standing at the bedroom mirror, she pulled off her scarf. A soft layer of dark, healthy hair was coming in across her scalp.<\/p>\n
She ran her fingers through it and smiled, her dimples showing. “Look, Gavin,” she said. “It’s finally growing back.”<\/p>\n
That afternoon, while I was clearing out the leather folder I’d carried into that living room a year before, she stopped me.<\/p>\n
The deeds went in a drawer.<\/p>\n
The bank statements went in a box in the closet. She took the medical reports and put them in her own file, the one she keeps in her nightstand, because she says a person should own the paper that proves what happened to her.<\/p>\n
Then she picked up the last thing. A small folded receipt, soft at the creases.<\/p>\n
“I want this one,” she said.<\/p>\n
“That one?” I’d used it to end the argument in that living room. I’d have burned it.<\/p>\n
“It’s the only thing from that whole year that I chose,” she said. She smoothed it out flat with her thumb. “Everything else, somebody did to me. This I decided.”<\/p>\n
She put it in the pocket of her winter coat, and as far as I know it is still there.<\/p>\n
I didn’t ask her why. I’ve stopped needing to be told everything before I let her have it.<\/p>\n
My husband got our house back by telling a lie, and every person who heard him tell it was glad.<\/p>\n
Then a lawyer asked him a simple question \u2014 where is the four hundred thousand dollars? \u2014 and I found out I had spent a year living inside a sentence that was never true.<\/p>\n
By that spring my hair was long enough to hold a clip, and I had started to be strange about it.<\/p>\n
I checked it in every reflective surface \u2014 the microwave door, the side of the toaster, the dark window over the sink at night.<\/p>\n
Gavin caught me at it once and didn’t say anything, which was worse than if he had.<\/p>\n
Fourteen months since the surgery. Nine months since the last round of chemo.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Six weeks since the oncologist used the word *stable* twice in one appointment and I cried in the parking garage in a way I hadn’t cried in the exam room.<\/p>\n
I had a job by then. Three days a week at the cancer center in Kansas City, in the office they call Patient Navigation, which is a soft name for the work of standing between sick people and the paperwork trying to kill them a second time.<\/p>\n
I made copies. I sat with women while they were on hold with insurance companies.<\/p>\n
I learned which pharmacies stocked the anti-nausea medication that actually worked and which ones would tell you it was backordered for a month.<\/p>\n
Sonya, who hired me, told me on my second day that the best navigators are always former patients and the worst thing about that is why.<\/p>\n
Gavin was at the shop most days until six. He and Wyatt had four employees by then and a contract with a company that made grain elevator parts, and he came home with his forearms scratched up and slept like a man who had used his body, which he had missed doing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We were, I want to be clear about this, happy. I don’t want the rest of this to make it sound like we weren’t.<\/p>\n
The letter came on a Thursday.<\/p>\n
It was certified, and I had to sign for it, and I remember thinking that nothing good has ever arrived certified. It was addressed to Gavin.<\/p>\n
I opened it anyway, because we’d agreed a year earlier that there would be no more envelopes in our house that only one of us was allowed to read.<\/p>\n
*IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF GREENE COUNTY, MISSOURI. PAIGE M. HOLLOWAY, Plaintiff, v. GAVIN R. HOLLOWAY, Defendant. PETITION FOR RESCISSION OF DEED OF GIFT, AND FOR DAMAGES ARISING FROM FRAUDULENT MISREPRESENTATION.*<\/p>\n
I sat down on the arm of the couch and read it twice.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Paige had a lawyer. Not a Derek. A real one \u2014 Sandra Kesler, of Kesler & Ahn, Springfield, whose name was printed at the bottom in a typeface that had never in its life been used to bluff.<\/p>\n
Most of it I could follow. Paige had signed the house over to Gavin at a notary’s office on a Wednesday afternoon two years ago.<\/p>\n
Paragraph eleven said she had done so because Gavin told her he was receiving a compensation package and shares worth approximately four hundred thousand dollars, and that he needed to demonstrate assets held in his own name in order to release it.<\/p>\n
Paragraph twelve was one line long.<\/p>\n
*No such compensation package existed.*<\/p>\n
I read that line probably six times. Then I put the petition on the counter, and I walked into the bathroom, and I stood in front of the mirror with my hands on the sink.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Because here is the thing. I knew.<\/p>\n
Of course I knew. I had been in the house. I had been in that damp back room when he came in at midnight and told me to hold on a few more days.<\/p>\n
He never sat me down and confessed a plan, but I am not a stupid woman, and I had spent five months in a place where I stayed alive by knowing what people meant instead of what they said.<\/p>\n
I knew there was no four hundred thousand dollars, and I let it happen, and then for a year I did not once ask about it.<\/p>\n
Not because I’d forgotten. Because asking would have made it a thing that existed, and I had a house and a garden and a job and hair coming in, and I wanted all of it more than I wanted to be a person who asked.<\/p>\n
Fourteen months of standing between other people and their paperwork. I could hear the truck in the driveway.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He read it standing up, in his work clothes, and I watched his face do the thing it does, which is nothing. Gavin’s face gives you nothing and his hands give you everything. He set the papers down and then he turned his wedding ring around twice.<\/p>\n
“Okay,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Okay?”<\/p>\n
“I’ll call somebody in the morning.”<\/p>\n
“Gavin.”<\/p>\n
“I know.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“There was never any four hundred thousand dollars.”<\/p>\n
“No.”<\/p>\n
“You made it up in the backyard. Standing there. With me on the ground.”<\/p>\n
“Yes.”<\/p>\n
I hadn’t planned to be angry. I genuinely hadn’t. It arrived out of nowhere, from underneath, the way it does.<\/p>\n
“Then it wasn’t ours,” I said. “None of it. Not one day of it. I have been planting tomatoes for a year in a yard we got by\u2014”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“It was mine.” He said it quietly but he said it fast. “Every dollar that built that house came off my back in Yellowknife. She had the deed because my mother put it in her name while I was two thousand miles away and couldn’t sign anything. I didn’t take a thing from Paige that Paige ever earned.”<\/p>\n
“I’m not saying she deserved it.”<\/p>\n
“Then what are you saying?”<\/p>\n
“I’m saying you lied to get a signature and you knew it was a lie when you got it.” My voice came out wrong. “You know what that means. You know that better than anybody in this house, because for five months your mother lied to me to get my compliance, and you have spent a year telling me that what she did to me was the worst thing you ever heard of.”<\/p>\n
He didn’t answer that. He sat down on the kitchen chair by the door, the one that’s always got a coat on it, and he put his hands on his knees.<\/p>\n
“I had seventy-two hours,” he said. “You had a tumor in you and no money and no phone and she’d have moved every dollar the second I said one honest word. I didn’t have a good option. I had one option.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I know.”<\/p>\n
“Then what do you want me to say?”<\/p>\n
“I want you to say it was a lie.”<\/p>\n
“It was a lie.”<\/p>\n
“Out loud, without the part after it.”<\/p>\n
He looked up. “It was a lie,” he said. “I lied to my mother and my sister at a notary’s office to take a house.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We sat with that for a while. The refrigerator cycled on.<\/p>\n
“I would do it again,” he said. “I want you to know that too.”<\/p>\n
“I know you would.”<\/p>\n
“Are you\u2014” He stopped. “Do you want to know what happens if we lose?”<\/p>\n
“Yes.”<\/p>\n
“We lose the house. Maybe worse than the house. Wyatt and I have a line of credit against it.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And that was the part I hadn’t gotten to yet, because I’d been busy being righteous in a bathroom.<\/p>\n
Four employees. A contract for grain elevator parts. Wyatt Cooper, who has three kids and who cosigned on faith.<\/p>\n
I said, “Then we’d better not lose.”<\/p>\n
Gavin let out a breath and something in his shoulders came down about an inch, and I have thought a great deal since about how easy it was, in that moment, to be the person who made him feel better. How practiced I already was at it.<\/p>\n
That’s the thing nobody tells you about coming out of a house like that one. You don’t come out of it with your instincts washed clean.<\/p>\n
You come out of it very, very good at managing other people’s feelings, and then you go home to a man who loves you and you keep doing it, because it’s the only thing you got good at during the worst year of your life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Our lawyer’s name was Ellis Nwachukwu and he was thirty-four and he was expensive and he was worth it.<\/p>\n
He came to the house on a Sunday and spread the file on our dining table and told us, in order, the things we were not going to enjoy hearing.<\/p>\n
One: Kesler was good. Two: on the narrow question, Paige was probably right \u2014 a deed of gift induced by a knowingly false statement of fact is voidable in Missouri, and a notary confirms that you signed, not that the man across the table was honest.<\/p>\n
Three: the winning argument was not going to be *the lie wasn’t a lie*.<\/p>\n
“Then what is it?” Gavin asked.<\/p>\n
“Unclean hands,” Ellis said. “And duress. Rescission is equitable relief. She’s asking a judge to be fair to her. So we’re going to spend our time on what she was doing while your wife was in that house, because a court can decline to hand a remedy to a plaintiff who is asking for fairness with that on her record.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“So it comes down to what happened to Gwen,” I said.<\/p>\n
Ellis looked at me. “It comes down to what happened to you. Yes.”<\/p>\n
“Then it comes down to me testifying.”<\/p>\n
“Yes.”<\/p>\n
Gavin said, “No.” We both turned.<\/p>\n
“She’s fourteen months out,” he said. “She’s got scans in June. She is not sitting in a room with Kesler for six hours getting asked whether she made up cancer. Find another way.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“There isn’t one,” Ellis said, not unkindly.<\/p>\n
“Then we lose the house.”<\/p>\n
“Gavin,” I said.<\/p>\n
“I mean it. I’ll sell the shop. I’ll go back north for two years. She doesn’t do this.”<\/p>\n
And there it was again, the same shape as the backyard, the same shape as the lie at the notary.<\/p>\n
Gavin loves me the way a man carries a heavy thing up a staircase \u2014 with his back, alone, without asking, and slightly too fast for anyone to help.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I’m going to say one thing,” I said, “and then we can talk about it later.”<\/p>\n
He waited. “Everybody in this story has made decisions about my body without asking me,” I said.<\/p>\n
“Your mother decided whether I saw a doctor. Paige decided who I was allowed to call. You decided I didn’t need to know about the four hundred thousand dollars. Now you’re deciding whether I testify.”<\/p>\n
I put my hand flat on the table. “I’ve been the subject of this whole thing since the day I found the lump. I’d like to be a person in it.”<\/p>\n
Ellis had the grace to look at the file.<\/p>\n
Gavin said, after a while, “Okay.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Okay?”<\/p>\n
“Okay. But I’m in the room.”<\/p>\n
“You’re not allowed in the room.”<\/p>\n
“Then I’m in the hall.”<\/p>\n
The next morning I called in to the cancer center and told Sonya I needed a personal day, and I got in the car and drove three hours to Springfield without telling anybody. I hadn’t been back. Not once.<\/p>\n
Marbury’s Salon Supply is on Commercial Street, and it is not really a salon supply anymore, it’s mostly a wholesale operation with a retail counter stuck on the front like an afterthought.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I had been there exactly one time in my life, on a Tuesday in October, in a wool hat, with a plastic grocery bag.<\/p>\n
The woman behind the counter was around sixty with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she didn’t recognize me, and why would she.<\/p>\n
I put the receipt on the counter.<\/p>\n
I’d kept it in the pocket of a winter coat for two years. Gavin had used a copy of it in his folder that night, the small folded paper he laid down last, and afterward I asked for the original back and he gave it to me without asking why.<\/p>\n
It was soft at the folds. **MARBURY’S SALON SUPPLY \u2014 HAIR, RAW, UNTREATED, 24IN, DARK \u2014 $150.00 \u2014 CASH.**<\/p>\n
“I’m trying to find out where this went,” I said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
She looked at the receipt, then at me, then at my hair, which is short and dark and was growing in with a wave it never had before, and I watched her put it together in about a second and a half.<\/p>\n
“Oh, honey,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s not a sad story,” I said. “I’m fine. I got better.”<\/p>\n
“That’s the whole point of the sad story, though, isn’t it.”<\/p>\n
She went in the back and was gone a long time. When she came out she had a green ledger, an actual paper ledger, and she set it on the counter and turned it around so I could read it.<\/p>\n
“We buy from walk-ins maybe forty times a year,” she said. “Most of it’s not usable. Yours was \u2014 twenty-four inches, no dye, no heat damage, healthy at the root. That’s rare. That goes to one place.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Her finger stopped on a line.<\/p>\n
*10\/24 \u2014 24in dk, virgin \u2014 LARKSPUR, COLUMBIA \u2014 lot 8817.*<\/p>\n
“Larkspur Hair Studio,” she said. “Columbia. Woman named Bev Larkin. She does custom pieces. Almost all of it’s oncology.”<\/p>\n
I put my hand on the counter. “Say that again.”<\/p>\n
“She makes wigs for cancer patients,” the woman said. “Hand-tied, real hair, the good kind, insurance won’t cover them so they run twelve, fifteen hundred dollars. She’s got a waiting list.”<\/p>\n
I stood in a wholesale beauty supply on Commercial Street and did the arithmetic that I think anyone would do.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I sold my hair for a hundred and fifty dollars to find out whether I had cancer.<\/p>\n
It became a wig that cost fourteen hundred dollars. And it went onto the head of a woman who already knew.<\/p>\n
My deposition was on the eleventh of May in a conference room in Springfield with a window that didn’t open.<\/p>\n
Sandra Kesler was about fifty, in a navy suit, and she was courteous to me for six hours in a way I found much harder to withstand than shouting.<\/p>\n
She never raised her voice. She thanked me for clarifying, several times. She had a manila folder she didn’t open until the fourth hour, which I understand now was on purpose.<\/p>\n
The first two hours were the house \u2014 who lived where, who paid what, whether I’d ever seen the deed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The third was the money, and I answered honestly that I had never been permitted to know anything about the money, and she wrote that down like it was helpful to her, which unsettled me.<\/p>\n
The fourth hour was my illness.<\/p>\n
She asked me when I first noticed the lump. She asked me why I waited five months.<\/p>\n
She asked whether it was true that I had been offered a ride to a clinic by a neighbor and declined it.<\/p>\n
That one landed, because it was true \u2014 Mrs. Jenkins had offered, and I’d said no, because Margaret had told me that if I embarrassed the family in front of the neighbors she would tell Gavin I’d been going out to meet men, and he was two thousand miles away and lonely and I did not think he would believe her, and I was not willing to find out.<\/p>\n
“So you had access to transportation,” Kesler said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I had access to a car,” I said. “I didn’t have access to a decision.”<\/p>\n
She let that pass without comment, which I’ve since learned is what a lawyer does when you’ve said something she’d rather the record moved past quickly.<\/p>\n
Then, in the fourth hour, she opened the manila folder.<\/p>\n
“Mrs. Holloway, I’d like to ask you about a conversation between you and your husband in the days after his return. Did there come a time when Gavin Holloway told you he was ashamed of your appearance?”<\/p>\n
The room got very quiet. Ellis said, “Objection to form,” in a bored voice, and then, “You can answer.”<\/p>\n
I want to describe the specific feeling, because I think there are people who need to know that it exists.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was not surprise. Paige had been in that house; of course she’d heard it; of course she’d told her lawyer.<\/p>\n
It was that for two years, that afternoon had been the one part of the whole thing I had never once said out loud, to anyone, including Gavin. Including myself, mostly.<\/p>\n
And a woman in a navy suit whom I had met at nine o’clock that morning had just reached into me and taken it out and put it on the table between us, in front of a court reporter, because it was useful to her client.<\/p>\n
“Yes,” I said.<\/p>\n
“What did he say?”<\/p>\n
“He said he was ashamed to be seen with me. He said I should stay in the kitchen when there were people in the house. He said that when the money came through he might file for divorce.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“How did that make you feel?”<\/p>\n
“Objection,” Ellis said.<\/p>\n
“You can answer,” Kesler said pleasantly.<\/p>\n
And here is where I had a choice, and I have thought about it every week since.<\/p>\n
The useful answer \u2014 the one that helped us \u2014 was *I knew it was a performance, I understood immediately, it didn’t affect me.* It was even partly true. I did know. I’d been watching people say things they didn’t mean for five months by then; I was better at it than anyone in that house.<\/p>\n
But I had spent fourteen months walking women through insurance calls, and the single thing I said to them most often, so often that Sonya teased me for it, was: *don’t manage it for them. Say the true thing. Make them hold it.*<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“It devastated me,” I said. Ellis put his pen down.<\/p>\n
“I knew what he was doing,” I said. “I want that in the record too, because it’s true. I understood within about a minute that he was performing for his mother, and part of me was relieved, because it meant he had a plan and I hadn’t had a plan in five months.<\/p>\n
“And it devastated me anyway. Because by then I weighed a hundred and one pounds and I had no hair and I’d been told every day for five months that I was a liar and a burden and that I looked disgusting, and when your husband says the same sentence in the same house in the same voice, it doesn’t matter what you know. It goes in the same place all the rest of it went. I lay in that room that night and I thought, so it’s true, then. Everyone agrees. Even him.<\/p>\n
“I was still thinking that four days later in the hospital when they told me I was malnourished. I think about it now. I checked my hair in the toaster this morning.”<\/p>\n
Kesler’s pen had stopped.<\/p>\n
“I’m telling you this because you’re going to use it,” I said. “That’s your job. But I’d like the record to show what you’re actually asking about.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“You’re asking whether my husband was cruel to me for two days in a house where his mother was cruel to me for five months. He was. Both things are in your file. I’d like the person who reads it to have to look at them next to each other.”<\/p>\n
Nobody said anything for a moment. The court reporter’s hands were still.<\/p>\n
“Let’s take ten minutes,” Sandra Kesler said.<\/p>\n
In the hallway Gavin was standing by the window with his back to me, and when he turned around I understood that the conference room door was not as thick as anyone had told us it was.<\/p>\n
He didn’t say anything. He’d heard the whole thing.<\/p>\n
“I’ve never said it,” I said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I know.”<\/p>\n
“I wasn’t keeping it from you. I just\u2014”<\/p>\n
“Gwen.” His voice was wrecked. “I have been waiting two years for you to be angry at me. Two years. You have never once\u2014” He stopped and pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. “I thought you’d forgiven me for it and I could never work out how.”<\/p>\n
“I hadn’t.”<\/p>\n
“No.”<\/p>\n
“I didn’t know how to be angry at you and safe at the same time,” I said. “I’ve only just now got enough spare room in me to do both.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Two weeks later I drove to Columbia.<\/p>\n
Larkspur Hair Studio is on the second floor of a building behind a bakery, and there’s no sign on the street, just a name on a buzzer, which Bev Larkin told me later is deliberate, because a lot of her clients don’t want to be seen going in.<\/p>\n
Bev is about seventy, tiny, with a gray braid and a jeweler’s loupe on a cord.<\/p>\n
When I explained why I’d come she made me tea and then she pulled a shoebox of index cards out from under a table, because she does not use a computer and has been told about this by many people.<\/p>\n
Lot 8817. She’d used it in a hand-tied cap in the December after I sold it.<\/p>\n
Twenty-four inches was long enough to make a piece nearly anyone could wear.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I remember this hair,” she said. “Do you know how rare it is to get twenty-four inches with no dye on it? I’ve been doing this thirty-one years. I’ve had maybe two hundred like it.”<\/p>\n
“Who has it?”<\/p>\n
Bev put the card down. “I’m not going to tell you a name, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m sure you understand why.”<\/p>\n
“I do.”<\/p>\n
“But I’ll tell you that she’s alive. I know that because she came back in February for a re-tie and I did it for free, which I do when they make it two years.”<\/p>\n
She looked at me over the loupe. “And I’ll tell her you asked. If she wants to find you, she’ll find you.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I said thank you, and I meant it, and I got about as far as the door before I turned around.<\/p>\n
“Can I ask you something?”<\/p>\n
“Mm.”<\/p>\n
“Do they know? The women who buy them. Where it comes from.”<\/p>\n
Bev thought about it.<\/p>\n
“Some ask,” she said. “Most don’t. What I tell them, if they ask, is that somebody grew it for twenty years and then let it go, and they usually needed the money.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
She shrugged. “It bothers people. It shouldn’t. That’s the whole business. That’s every wig in this room. Somebody who needed a hundred and fifty dollars, and somebody who needed hair.”<\/p>\n
I sat back down without being asked.<\/p>\n
“I sold mine to find out if I had cancer,” I said. “That was the hundred and fifty dollars. That was the bus fare and the biopsy.”<\/p>\n
Bev Larkin looked at me for a long moment.<\/p>\n
“Oh,” she said. “Well. That’s a new one.”<\/p>\n
And then she laughed, this shocked little bark of a laugh, and I laughed too, and it was the first time in two years that any part of that had been funny to me, and I sat in a wig studio in Columbia, Missouri, laughing with a seventy-year-old woman about the worst year of my life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I drove home the long way.<\/p>\n
Here’s what I’d gone up there to do, and I may as well be honest since I’ve been honest about the rest.<\/p>\n
I’d gone to get it back. Not legally \u2014 I knew it wasn’t mine anymore, I’d sold it, I signed a paper. But somewhere in me was the idea that if I could see it, if I could hold it, something would be returned to me that had been taken.<\/p>\n
But it hadn’t been taken.<\/p>\n
That’s what I understood on I-70 somewhere east of Boonville. Everything else in those five months was taken. My phone was taken. My food was taken. My name in that house was taken and handed around and laughed at.<\/p>\n
The hair I *sold*. I decided. I got up one morning, and I walked to Commercial Street because I had no bus fare, and I put it on a counter and traded it for the one thing I wanted, which was to know.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It’s the only decision I made in five months. It’s the only thing in the entire year that was mine.<\/p>\n
And it bought a woman in Columbia two years so far, and a free re-tie in February, which Bev does when they make it that long.<\/p>\n
I’d have been taking that back. From her.<\/p>\n
Margaret withdrew from the suit in June.<\/p>\n
She had been a co-plaintiff \u2014 it was her authorization that moved the investment accounts, and Kesler had needed her.<\/p>\n
In the third week of June she went to Kesler’s office in Springfield and told her she would not sign anything further and that if she were called, she would testify truthfully about the five months, and that truthfully meant what Gavin’s video already showed and a good deal more that nobody had recorded.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
She was not doing it for us.<\/p>\n
I want to be clear about that, because I have read the letter she sent me and I’ve read it more than once and I don’t think she is a good woman now.<\/p>\n
I think she is a woman who worked eleven-hour shifts in a commissary kitchen for two years and lost the ability to tell herself the story.<\/p>\n
It cost her the money. That’s how I know it was real.<\/p>\n
It’s the only way I know anything is real anymore \u2014 what it cost the person doing it.<\/p>\n
Kesler withdrew from representing Paige eight days later.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ellis explained that this happens more than people think: a contingency lawyer looks at a case where the plaintiff’s own mother will testify against her, and does arithmetic, and goes.<\/p>\n
Paige called Gavin twice. He didn’t answer. She called the shop. Wyatt took a message that said *tell him I have nothing.*<\/p>\n
They settled in August, and I made him do it my way.<\/p>\n
Ellis’s advice was to let it die \u2014 Paige had no lawyer, no corroboration, no money to file again. Gavin’s preference was to give her nothing at all, and I understood that preference in my bones, and I told him no.<\/p>\n
He paid her eleven thousand dollars.<\/p>\n
And he signed a one-page acknowledgment, drafted by Ellis and filed with the settlement, stating that on the date in question he had represented to Paige M. Holloway the existence of a compensation package of approximately four hundred thousand dollars; that no such package existed; and that he had made the statement knowingly.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He fought me on that page for a week and a half.<\/p>\n
“It’s a confession,” he said. “In a public file. Anybody can pull it.”<\/p>\n
“Yes.”<\/p>\n
“For what? She’s got nothing. She can’t do anything with it.”<\/p>\n
“It’s not for her.”<\/p>\n
“Then who’s it for?”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I had to think about how to say it.<\/p>\n
“Your mother told me for five months that I was making up cancer,” I said. “And you know what the worst part was? It wasn’t that she said it. It was that there was no piece of paper anywhere on earth that said I wasn’t. There was nothing to point at. It was just her word in a house, and my word in a house, and hers was louder.<\/p>\n
“I have paper now. I have scans and pathology and a deposition transcript. It’s the only reason I’m all right. And I’m not going to live in a house that we got by making sure Paige never gets any.”<\/p>\n
He signed it on a Tuesday.<\/p>\n
I’m not going to tell you she deserved eleven thousand dollars, because she didn’t.<\/p>\n
I’m going to tell you that I have been the person in the room whose version doesn’t get written down, and I decided I wasn’t going to make anyone else be that person, including her, including someone who called me a burden while I was starving.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That’s not forgiveness. Bev Larkin would call that the whole business.<\/p>\n
The scans in June were clear. The scans in December were clear.<\/p>\n
My hair is past my shoulders now. It came in with a wave in it and about a dozen grays at the temple that arrived all at once, and I have decided to keep them, mostly out of spite toward nobody in particular.<\/p>\n
I went full-time at the cancer center in the fall.<\/p>\n
Sonya put me on intake, which is the first conversation, the one where somebody sits down across from you on the worst morning of their life and you have forty minutes to find out what’s actually going to stop them.<\/p>\n
It isn’t usually the diagnosis. It’s almost never the diagnosis. It’s a car that doesn’t run, or a job that won’t hold, or a person at home who has opinions about whether they’re really sick.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I keep the receipt in the plastic sleeve of my badge holder, behind my ID.<\/p>\n
I don’t show it often. Maybe once a month.<\/p>\n
But every so often a woman sits down in that chair and starts doing the arithmetic out loud \u2014 what she can sell, what she can do without, how much a scan costs if you just pay cash \u2014 and she gets a certain look, and I know the look, and I take the badge off and turn it over and put it on the desk in front of her.<\/p>\n
**MARBURY’S SALON SUPPLY \u2014 HAIR, RAW, UNTREATED, 24IN, DARK \u2014 $150.00 \u2014 CASH.**<\/p>\n
“That’s mine,” I say. “That’s what I got for it. October, two years ago, Commercial Street in Springfield.”<\/p>\n
Most of them cry. Some of them laugh, which I prefer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And then we start on the actual work, which is the grant application and the transportation voucher and the number for Bev Larkin in Columbia, who will put you on a list and who does not charge for the re-tie at two years.<\/p>\n
Gavin comes home at six. The shop has nine employees now.<\/p>\n
We kept the house, which I have complicated feelings about, and there is a page in a courthouse in Greene County with my husband’s signature on it admitting exactly how we got it, and I sleep better for that page than I would have for the money.<\/p>\n
Margaret sends a card at Christmas. I read them. I don’t write back yet. Bev would tell me that isn’t the same as never.<\/p>\n
Paige, I don’t know about. That’s not quite true.<\/p>\n
In March a woman came through intake at the center \u2014 not Paige, a stranger, forty-one, two kids \u2014 and somewhere in the forty minutes she mentioned that her sister-in-law had told her the whole thing was probably in her head.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And I sat there with my hands flat on the desk and I thought about a girl at a birthday party in a dress that cost four hundred dollars, laughing.<\/p>\n
I did my job. I gave the woman the transportation voucher and the number in Columbia and my direct line.<\/p>\n
But I went out to the car afterward and sat there for twenty minutes, and what I found in myself was not what I expected, and I haven’t worked out yet what to do with it.<\/p>\n
Because I know exactly where Paige lives.<\/p>\n
She sends her address on the back of the envelope every time she sends a card to Margaret, and Margaret sends the cards to me, and I have never once opened them.<\/p>\n
They’re in the drawer of the hall table. Four of them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This morning I stood at the bathroom mirror and put my hair up, and it stayed up, which took a year and a half to be true again.<\/p>\n
“Look at that,” Gavin said from the doorway.<\/p>\n
“I know.”<\/p>\n
“Second time this week.”<\/p>\n
“I’m counting,” I said.<\/p>\n
End of Part Two.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After four years working abroad and sending home nearly a hundred thousand dollars, I came back without warning…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=777"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":801,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions\/801"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laptopsvilla.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}