For Our 10th Anniversary, My Husband Gave Me a Green Dress and My Sister a Baby novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Forty Years in a Closet

At her mother's kitchen table Phoebe cuts up the green dress Martha kept for forty years, then finds sixty thousand dollars moved out of the joint account before the party. Bethany knocks at 2 a.m.

My mother opened her door at ten o'clock at night in her robe and her reading glasses.

She looked at my bare arms and the car keys in my fist.

"Come in before the neighbors see you," she said.

I sat at her kitchen table, and she put a mug of tea in front of me and didn't ask a single question.

My phone buzzed against the wood.

Graeme. Graeme. Graeme.

The screen filled with missed calls, and then a text from him came through.

Please come home so we can talk like adults. Bethany is very upset.

I turned the phone face down.

"He gave me a dress," I said.

My mother sat down across from me.

"What kind of dress?"

"Green. Satin. Maternity."

She took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

She did not say, "Oh, honey," or any of the other things I had braced for.

"Wait here," she said.

She went down the hall, and I heard the closet door scrape, and something heavy being dragged off a shelf.

When she came back, she had a plastic garment bag over her arm.

Through the clear plastic I could see green.

Faded now, dull at the folds, with a yellowed collar.

"You kept it," I said.

"Twenty-three years," she said. "I told myself it was evidence."

"Of what?"

"That I wasn't crazy. That he really did it."

She laid it across the table between our mugs.

It was the same shade as the one in the box on my mantel.

I felt sick.

"Mom, he knew about this. I told him all of it."

"I know you did."

"He swore he'd never hurt me that way."

"I know, baby."

She went to the drawer by the stove and came back with her good kitchen scissors, the orange-handled ones she used for chicken.

"What are you doing?"

"Twenty-three years I've been hanging on to this thing," my mother said. "I'm done."

She opened the garment bag and took out the dress and cut it straight up the middle.

The satin tore with a hard crisp sound.

She cut the sleeves off at the shoulders, and the skirt into long strips, and she cut the collar into four pieces and dropped them in the sink.

Then she held out the scissors to me.

I took them.

I cut the last strip in half, and then in half again, and my hands stopped shaking.

My mother turned on the tap and rinsed the green pieces down the drain until the sink was clear.

"There," she said. "Now we eat something."

She made me scrambled eggs and toast at ten-thirty at night, and I ate all of it.

She sat across from me with her chin in her hand.

"Did you say anything to them? At the party?"

"I put my ring in the cake."

My mother started to laugh, a real surprised laugh, and then I was laughing too, until it turned into something else, and she came around the table and held my head against her cardigan.

I cried for a while.

It wasn't very pretty, and she didn't tell me to stop.

When I could breathe again, I picked up my phone to turn it off.

The bank app had sent me a notification an hour ago, and I had missed it.

Transfer completed: $60,000.00, from joint checking to an account ending 4417.

It had gone out at 4:12 that afternoon, before the party, before the toast.

I had never seen that account number in my life.

Graeme had moved sixty thousand dollars of our money out of our account while I was setting out the napkins.

"What is it?" my mother asked.

I showed her.

She read it twice and put her glasses back on.

"He planned this," she said quietly. "Not just the baby. All of it."

"He wanted me gone before I could count."

"Then count," my mother said. "Tonight."

I borrowed her laptop, the old one with the sticky keys, and I logged into the company books, where I had been the only one with the full admin password for nine years.

My login still worked.

The password had not been changed yet.

I sat there at my mother's kitchen table, and I started pulling every statement I could find.

At a quarter to two, a car door shut outside, and then someone started knocking on my mother's front door.

Soft, scared little knocks.

My mother went to the peephole.

"It's Bethany," she said. "She's alone."

She looked at me.

"She's crying, and she's asking for you."

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