Chapter 7: The Money Set Aside
By the time the security guard walked Eric away from the hospital entrance, the room had gone quiet except for the monitor beside my bed. My baby’s heartbeat kept its steady rhythm. I held on to that sound while the door clicked shut behind him.
Megan was standing near the window, her arms folded tight across her chest. Dad had stayed beside my bed, close enough to help but not so close that I felt crowded.
I looked from one of them to the other.
“What money did Eric mean?”
Megan’s eyes flicked to Dad. That small glance unsettled me more than a rushed explanation would have.
“We talked about savings for the baby,” she said carefully. “You and Eric. The money you’d been putting away.”
“I know about the savings.” I pressed my palm to the blanket over my stomach. “I don’t know why he’d say we needed to sell the house to pay for the baby.”
“He told me his business was in trouble,” Dad said.
The words seemed to take up all the air in the room.
“When?”
“Not long ago. He asked me for a short-term loan.” Dad’s jaw tightened. “He said he had an urgent business problem and needed help getting through it.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I should have.” He didn’t look away. “He asked me to keep it between us until he could fix things. I thought I was giving him a chance to explain himself to you. I was wrong.”
His apology didn’t erase the hurt. It did keep me from having to drag the truth out of him.
“How much did he ask for?”
“Enough that I wanted to know why he couldn’t come to you himself.” Dad rubbed a thumb along the edge of his palm. “He said you already had too much to worry about.”
I heard Eric’s voice in that sentence, dressed up as concern. I’d heard it before whenever he wanted to make a decision on my behalf.
Megan moved closer to the bed. “Claire, I remember you saying the savings were for the baby. You were proud of how much you’d put away.”
“I was.”
“What if Eric was trying to cover the business problem with it?” she asked.
My fingers curled into the sheet. “He doesn’t get to decide that for me.”
“No,” Dad said. “He doesn’t.”
The monitor continued its calm, measured beeping. My body felt too heavy to move, but anger had begun to wake in me, hot and sharp beneath the exhaustion.
“Where are the account notices?” I asked.
Megan frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Every time something changed, I used to get an alert. I haven’t seen one in weeks.”
“You could check the account,” Dad said. “If you want.”
I did want to. I also wanted to know what I might find.
Megan took out her phone and unlocked it. I gave her the bank’s website and the password I’d used for years. My hands shook as I typed, so she held the phone steady while I entered each character.
The page loaded. A list of account messages appeared, dated over the last several weeks.
I stared at them.
“There,” I said. “Those are the notices I never got.”
Megan scrolled slowly. A deposit alert. A change to the account’s contact information. Another notice, marked delivered.
The address listed beside them wasn’t mine.
I leaned closer, reading it again as if the letters might rearrange themselves into something I recognized. They didn’t. It was an address I had never used and didn’t know.
“Could that be a mistake?” Megan asked.
“I don’t know.” My mouth had gone dry. “But it wasn’t supposed to go there.”
Dad leaned in, careful not to touch the phone. “Do you remember changing the contact information?”
“No.”
“Could Eric have had access to your login?”
“I don’t know.” The answer tasted like shame, though I couldn’t have explained what I’d done to deserve it. I had trusted the person who shared my home. I had treated that trust like proof that nothing could happen behind my back.
Megan’s thumb hovered over the newest message.
“Open it,” I said.
She tapped.
A transaction notice filled the screen. The words were plain and bloodless: a transfer had been completed from the savings account. It was large enough that the balance below it looked unfamiliar, almost emptied of meaning.
For a moment, I couldn’t make myself breathe.
Then I saw the authorization details.
The transfer had been approved online using my credentials.
Megan’s hand flew to her mouth. Dad went still beside me.
I stared at my name on the screen—the name Eric had put on the house papers, the name attached now to a transfer I had never made.
My baby kicked beneath my palm.
May you like
And suddenly the question wasn’t whether Eric had taken money meant for our child.
It was how long he’d been using my name to do it.
