We took one family vacation every year, usually somewhere within driving distance because plane tickets for four people were too expensive—the Adirondacks, the Jersey Shore, once all the way to Florida where the kids complained about the heat. The kids would ask “Are we there yet?” from the backseat roughly every ten minutes, and Troy would catch my eye and we’d both try not to laugh.
It was all so beautifully, perfectly normal that I didn’t even notice the lies beginning until it was far, far too late to do anything about them.
The day I discovered money disappearing from our account
We’d been married thirty-five years—thirty-five years of shared breakfasts and inside jokes and knowing exactly how the other person took their coffee—when I first noticed money missing from our joint checking account.
Our son Michael had recently sent us some money through an online transfer—a partial repayment of a loan we’d given him three years earlier to help with his down payment on his first house. I logged into our bank account on my laptop to move the deposit into our savings account, same routine I’d done dozens of times before.
The balance that appeared on my screen just about gave me a heart attack.
My hand actually went to my chest, and I felt my heart pounding beneath my palm.
The deposit from Michael was definitely there, showing up clearly in the recent transactions. But somehow, impossibly, the overall account balance was still thousands of dollars lower than it should have been. Significantly lower.
