The Halloween Night I Buried My Mother, He CheatedChapter 2

Ryan stared at me for a second. Then he burst out laughing.

"Lena, do you even hear yourself?"

"Divorce? You?" He shook his head, still laughing. "That's rich."

"Fine, if you don't want to cook, then don't. Just go grab some takeout."

He pulled out more crumpled bills and pressed them into my hand with the twenty.

"There. Forty bucks total. Make it last."

I stood there, staring at the money in my palm.

eight years of marriage. This was only the second time he'd ever given me this much at once.

The first time was Tyler's birth. I hemorrhaged on the delivery table and nearly died.

The hospital called Ryan in and told him to prepare for the worst.

He'd looked shaken. Wrote the check without arguing. Nearly three thousand.

Then he turned around and told the doctor to skip my epidural.

He needed to save the money. For Sarah.

He'd bought her a car that same month. A brand-new Honda Accord.

I only found that out today, from a small notebook fell out of his jacket along with the receipts.

I opened it.

Page after page. His handwriting. Dates. Amounts. Every line ended the same way.

For Sarah.

I let out a short, bitter laugh. When I looked up, he was gone.

Ryan was already inside.

Through the door, I could hear Tyler's voice, sharp and irritated.

"Dad, you shouldn't have given her anything. She only pulls this drama because you let her. You're too soft."

"Honestly? Just divorce her. She's a housewife. Not like Aunt Sarah. Mom never even went to college."

Ryan was quiet for a long time.

Then, slowly, almost gently, he spoke.

"Your mother actually had the chance to go to college."

"Your grandma scraped together the tuition for her. Borrowed from everyone she knew. Relatives, neighbors, friends. Every penny of it."

He paused.

"I took that money and gave it to Sarah."

"Sarah was fragile. She couldn't handle hard work, couldn't handle disappointment. If she couldn't afford school, it would've broken her. "

His voice was soft. Tender, even. Full of old regret.

But not for me.

The words hit me like lightning splitting the sky open.

I looked down at my hands.

Rough. Cracked. Nails chipped down to nothing. The knuckles still swollen from years of winter damage.

And just like that, the memory surfaced.

The summer I got my acceptance letter, my mother had already pulled together every dollar for my tuition.

She'd gone door to door. Borrowed from my uncle, who barely had enough himself. Borrowed from neighbors who owed her old favors.

She swallowed her pride at every doorstep so her daughter could have a future.

The money was kept in a small envelope in our kitchen drawer. She'd counted it twice. It was all there.

Then one morning it wasn't.

Mom and I tore the house apart looking for it.

She nearly collapsed, thinking she'd misplaced it.

She went back to every person she'd borrowed from, begging, apologizing, trying to scrape it together again.

She couldn't.

Ryan held my hands while I cried.

"It's okay, Lena. Listen to me. "He got down on his knees.

"I'm about to get promoted. You don't need college. I'll take care of you. I'll take care of everything. You will never have to worry."

"I'm going to give you a good life. I swear."

So I let it go.

I told myself the money was just gone. Bad luck. A cruel twist of fate.

But my mother carried that guilt for eight years. She believed until the day she died that she'd somehow lost the money herself. That she'd failed me.

She never failed me.

Ryan stole it.

He took every dollar my mother had bled for and handed it to Sarah Lawson, because she was "delicate," because she "couldn't handle struggle."

He gave away the future my mother had broken herself to build for me.