The Store My Husband Thought Was His

What Wade Thought He Owned

I found out over the following two weeks exactly how big a house of cards my husband had built, and I am going to tell you, because the size of it is the whole point.

Wade had not just been having an affair. He had been planning an exit, and the exit was built entirely on things that were not his.

He had told Kayla, and I heard this from three different directions eventually, small towns being what they are, that he was going to leave his wife and that he would be “getting the store in the settlement” and that they would sell it and move somewhere warm and start fresh. He had shown her pictures of a lake development down in the Ozarks. He had told her he was “basically the owner” of Tilden Feed and Seed, that he had “built it up,” which was a special kind of lie because Wade had never once in nineteen years worked a Saturday behind that counter.

He had told the loan officer at the bank in Danby a version of the same story. And here is where it turned from betrayal into something with a legal name.

The Loan

When Diane pulled everything, we found that four months earlier Wade had gone into the bank and applied for a personal line of credit, a big one for a man on a sales rep’s salary, and to get it he had represented himself as a co-owner of the business. He had listed the store as an asset behind the loan. And on the application, in the spot for the spouse and co-owner’s acknowledgment, there was a signature that was supposed to be mine.

It was not mine. I had never seen that piece of paper in my life. He had signed my name himself, in a hand that leaned the way his hand leans, and he had walked out of that bank with a line of credit he had been quietly draining for four months. The new bumper. The dinners. The diamond, which I now understood had not been for me. A down payment he had put on a truck for Kayla. The Ozarks pictures.

I sat in Diane’s office and I looked at my own name forged on a bank document and I felt the last soft thing in me go hard.

Diane looked at it a long time. Then she took off her glasses and she said, “Nora, I want to be careful how I say this, because I am your lawyer and my job is to protect you. But that is bank fraud. That is forgery on a lending document. And the business he pledged as collateral, the business he told them he co-owns, he does not own any part of. It has been in an irrevocable trust in your name for eleven years. He had no more right to pledge that store than the man who sweeps the bank lobby.”

I asked her what that meant for me.

She said, “It means the bank’s claim is against him, personally, not against your trust. Your store cannot be touched. Your house cannot be touched. Your father made sure of that.” She paused. “It also means that when the bank finds out that signature is forged, and they will, because we are going to tell them, they are not going to be chasing you. They are going to be chasing him. And they will not be gentle.”