Chapter 4: Her Twenty-One Thousand

I still knew the door code for Calvin's lab.

Nobody had changed it in four years, because I was the one who changed codes.

I punched it in and walked through.

Eight graduate students sat at their screens in the long white room.

Calvin stood at the whiteboard with a marker.

Lydia sat on the edge of his desk with her notebook on her knee.

"Dee," Calvin said. His whole face lit up. "You came."

"I came for my money."

He lowered the marker. "What money?"

"Twenty-one thousand dollars. It went from our joint account into something called the lab reserve on Saturday night."

"Oh. That." He rubbed his forehead and smiled at the room.

"That's a sensible thing, Dee. The equipment order closes on Friday, and the account was just sitting there."

"It was my savings."

"It was our savings."

"I put in twenty-one thousand. You put in the rest of it, which was nothing."

One of the graduate students made a very small noise.

Calvin's smile slipped, and then he found it again. "That's a little unfair. I contributed my time."

"Your time isn't a deposit."

Lydia slid off the desk and came toward me with her hands out.

"Nessa. Sweetheart. Nobody took anything. The money is safe, it's earning interest, and Calvin will pay you back in March."

"March."

"When the grant closes. It's cleaner for the audit."

"I'll have it by Friday," I said.

Calvin laughed. He actually laughed.

"Dee, that's not possible. It's committed. It's already on the purchase order."

"Then you'll find twenty-one thousand dollars somewhere else."

"With what?"

"You're a genius," I said. "Figure it out."

Nobody in the room moved.

Then a student in the back row, a thin man with a tablet, said, "She has a point," very quietly.

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