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“Does it even run?”
“I drove it home.”
Eliza leveled her chin, looked into her husband’s eyes. “You have your G-Class, and now you have your Corvette. Pick one, please, and sell the other. There’s no sense in you having two cars.”
“I can’t use the Corvette as my daily driver.”
“Then sell it,” she said abruptly, feeling edgy, pushing the needle. He’d chosen the wrong day to be impulsive.
“No.”
“You must.” Eliza’s fists clenched as she stared down her husband. “We can’t afford it.”
“We just fought about this last night, Eliza. You’ve got to stop nagging me about money.”
“This isn’t nagging; this is it, Roman. Our bank accounts are dangerously close to empty.” Eliza let the flowers fall from her grasp as she balled her hands into fists. Immediately, she wished she’d kept her mouth shut, but she’d spoken the truth, and she could no longer ignore it. “We are broke.”
Roman’s gaze settled on her. A new expression appeared on his face, a satisfaction that caught Eliza off guard. Almost victorious.
“I know,” he said.
“You know what?”
“I know everything.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you’ve been funneling money into my checking account,” Roman said. “Quietly, as if I’m stupid enough to ignore the fact that the numbers on our bank account are dwindling.”
“This was a test?” Eliza’s lips parted as she sucked in a sharp breath. “You knew this whole time, yet you went and bought a car?”
“There was money in my checking account,” he said pointedly, a righteous anger sizzling below his brown eyes. “Why were you trying to keep our finances from me?”
“I—I wasn’t.”
“Honey.” Roman’s voice took on a sweet, soft tone. “I’ve asked you not to lie to me.”
“I tried to tell you that we didn’t have much—”
“You didn’t try hard enough,” Roman said. “You wanted me to think we were doing just fine. Why was that, Eliza? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
Eliza froze and found herself wondering that very same thing. But she knew why. She hadn’t told him sooner because money was the one aspect of their marriage that she could control. She brought home the cash. Roman didn’t make diddly-squat teaching acting classes. It was Eliza who kept him fueled, made this lifestyle possible.
It was the one thing she brought to the table in their relationship. Eliza owed Roman a good life after what he’d done for her, and she could no longer deliver it. And that broke her heart.
“I understand if you’re upset,” Eliza said. “But I will fix this. I’ve already started.”
Roman seemed to sense he was being led into a trap, and he didn’t know the way out. “You’ve started to fix it? How?”
“I asked your parents for a loan.”
“You did what?”
“Tonight, before I met with Anne, I had dinner with your parents at the country club and asked them for money. It’s a business investment.”
“Without telling me.”
“It is my problem, my loan, my favor to ask of them.”
