Page 14 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

"He didn't care. He said it wasn't working, it was something I'd done. Then he told me he's taking a job in Florida. He packed a bag and left. He didn't even say sorry."

A pause. "Do you want me to come down? I can drive down tomorrow. Whatever you need."

For one second I was small again and I wanted to say yes. I couldn’t.

"He's the one leaving," I said. "I'm fine otherwise."

"Alright. You call me. Anything at all, you hear me?"

I hung up first.

What I had held flat through the whole call gave out. It was nothing like the cry with Janice. That had been a release. I went down over my own knees with my arms around my middle and made sounds I didn’t recognize as mine. The phone slid off my lap onto the carpet. I left it.

I had known it, walking into the call. And some stupid hopeful childish version of me had hoped anyway, hoped he would just be my father for once, hoped he would say he was sorry for all the years I spent being the good girl so he would keep looking at me, hoped he would tell me this one was not mine to carry.

Brad had been the whole shape of my days. Outside of Janice, I had built nothing of my own, no one to call now. The aloneness I had lived in after my mother left, the one I had spent my adult life making sure I never felt again, was already coming up through the floor.

I pulled Whiskers into my chest. He rumbled there, warm and entirely unbothered, the one living thing in the house that had not gone anywhere.

I stayed in the dark for a long time.

9 - SALT IN THE WOUND

Lacey

The next morning I opened my bank app, or at least tried to, but the password didn't work. I still felt numb, but irritation gnawed as well, because I didn't have time to go to the bank. In the end, I didn’t get to the nearest branch until my already short lunch that Tuesday.

The branch was cold and smelled like carpet cleaner. A woman named Harpreet sat me down at a desk with a nameplate and a small dish of butterscotch candies and asked for my ID, and I handed it over still in my scrubs with my badge clipped to the pocket, thinking about the echo I had to read at two and whether I'd have time to eat.

"The app locked me out," I said. "It's probably nothing. Somebody changed a password."

Harpreet typed. She had reading glasses on a beaded chain and a wedding ring she turned once with her thumb while she waited for the screen.

Then she stopped typing.

I have watched a hundred people receive news across a table. I know the tell from the other side of it, the half second where the professional face has to decide what it's going to be. I watched Harpreet's face make that decision, and I felt the cold arriving in my hands.

"Dr. Bonds." She turned the monitor a little, then thought better of it and turned it back. "The joint checking and savings were closed yesterday. The brokerage account was liquidated over three months ago."

"There must be a hold on the wire." I heard how reasonable I sounded. "Wires take a day or two, don't they? There's a window."

"It cleared this morning."

I sat with my hands flat on my thighs under the desk, and I asked her the next question in the voice I use to order labs.

"How much?"

She told me.

I made her say it again, because the first time it went by me. She said it again. I looked at the little dish of butterscotch candies.

"The cards," I said.

More typing. Longer this time.

All seven cards were at their limits, and we had high limits. I hadn't even known we had seven credit cards. Over a hundred thousand dollars, just in card debt. There was a line of credit against the house I had signed my name to at a closing table in 2019 without reading it, because Brad handled the money, because Brad had always handled the money, because I was doing my fellowship and I was tired and the papers went where he pointed. It was drawn down to nothing.

"It's all in his name too," I said. "The accounts are joint."