The Call My Husband Never Ended

They thought I was a fool with a checking account and a broken heart. They were wrong about the checking account, and they were about to be wrong about the rest of it too.

I want to back up, because you need to understand exactly what I lost that night, and why the woman on the other end of that call was not some stranger I could write off easily.

Nolabelle and I had grown up two farms apart. We had ridden the same bus since kindergarten, stood up in each other’s weddings, and spent more holidays at each other’s tables than most sisters manage. When I lost the first pregnancy, she was the one who drove me to the clinic in Columbia at five in the morning because Merlin had a loan closing he said he could not move. When I lost the second one, later and harder, she sat on the tile floor of my bathroom with me at two in the morning, not saying much of anything, just staying there until the sun came up, and told me afterward that God was not finished with me yet. I had believed her completely. That is the part that took the longest to sit with once the shock wore off, not that my husband had betrayed me, but that the person who held my head up through the worst nights of my life had been lying to my face the entire time she did it.

I want to back up further still, because you need to understand what they were actually trying to steal, and why it was never going to be as simple as they thought.