My Daughter Is Dying, and My Husband Is Saving His Lover's Son novel · Chapter 12 of 32
Chapter 12: The Other Parents
"Empty," I said. "How much was in it?"
"Last statement, a hundred and sixty-some thousand. The rest she'd already spent."
"Where did it go?"
"Somewhere I can't see yet. I'm working on it."
I hung up and sat with the phone in my lap.
Two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars from strangers.
Forty-eight thousand of it ours.
Gone at 2:30 in the morning while Clara slept and I dreamed about studio lights.
The mom across the hall knocked at nine with two coffees, the way she had every morning for a week.
She didn't sit on the end of my recliner this time.
She stood in the doorway holding both cups.
"Did they say where the money went?" she asked.
"No."
"Is it coming back?"
"I don't know."
She nodded, and kept nodding, too long.
"Honey," she said. "I have to tell you something, and I need you not to be nice about it."
I took one of the coffees.
"I gave her five hundred dollars," she said. "In October. When my boy was first diagnosed."
I didn't say anything.
"I found that page the night we got the news. Three in the morning, in a motel in Lexington, scrolling. And there's this boy with no hair, in a hospital gown, and his mom saying all the things I was too scared to say." She swallowed. "I felt less alone. So I gave her the five hundred."
"You didn't have five hundred."
"No, I did not. It was the electric bill. They shut it off in November." She laughed, which wasn't a laugh. "My other kids did homework by a camping lantern for a week. And I thought, well, at least that little boy is getting his treatment."
I put the coffee down.
"I'm going to get it back," I said.
"You don't have to."
"I'm going to get it back."
She looked at me a long time.
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