The teller stared at her screen, then at me, and I knew something was wrong before she even spoke. The bank was cold enough to raise goosebumps on my arms, but sweat had already started gathering at the back of my neck. I had come there to collect what I thought was a small, insulting amount of money.
Instead, the young woman behind the counter looked as if the floor had shifted beneath her. “Ma’am,” she said carefully, “there isn’t 3,000 dollars in this account.”
For a second, my mind went somewhere darker than shock. I thought Richard had done one last cruel thing and left me a useless card with nothing on it.
My fingers tightened around the strap of my mended handbag. I heard my own voice come out thin and unfamiliar. “Then how much is there?”
The teller swallowed, glanced toward the offices behind the glass wall, and picked up the phone.
Less than a minute later, a branch manager in a navy blazer came out holding a sealed cream envelope. My full name was written across the front in handwriting I would have recognized even if I had lived to be a hundred. Richard’s.
My legs went weak before the woman said a word. She asked me, in a voice so gentle it frightened me, if I would come with her to her office. I followed because I no longer trusted myself to stand in public.
She shut the door, turned her monitor slightly in my direction, and tapped the screen with one manicured nail. The number there did not belong to my life. $314,287.64.
I looked at it once. Then again. I waited for the digits to rearrange themselves into something smaller, something logical, something that matched the man who had placed a bank card in my palm five years earlier and spoken to me as if I were a burden he was finally free to set down.
They did not move. “There must be a mistake,” I said. The manager shook her head.
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