Chapter 2 - The Records I'd Been Keeping
I drove home with four hours of quiet and $640 worth of clarity.
Travis thought I'd folded. He thought I'd swallowed it, gotten in my car, and let it go the way older women are supposed to let things go.
He didn't know I'd been keeping track.
Every meal I'd cooked. Every load of wash. Every 2 a.m. bottle so Megan could sleep. Every trip to the grocery store. Every hour on my knees on his bathroom tile.
I sat down at my own kitchen table that night with a legal pad and wrote all of it out. Fourteen days. I had a line for every one of them.
Then I called Megan.
She picked up on the second ring, her voice barely above a whisper. The baby was down.
"Mom? You make it home okay?"
"I'm home safe, sweetheart. I have one question for you. Did you know Travis handed me a bill this morning?"
Nothing. Then: "A what?"
"Six hundred and forty dollars. Food, utilities, and the guest room."
The silence stretched out. When she spoke again her voice had changed completely.
"Mom. Tell me he did not do that."
"He did. And I paid it."
"You paid it?"
"Every dollar."
Another pause. Then, very quietly: "Mom... what are you going to do?"
I looked down at the legal pad. Fourteen days of work in blue ink.
"Don't you worry about that, honey."
But Megan had gone quiet in a way I recognized — the quiet of someone sitting on something heavy.
May you like
"Mom," she said slowly. "There's something about that house Travis never told you."
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