The Love We Missed novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Happy Birthday

"No," I said. "I didn't."

Tricia turned the phone so I could see.

A withdrawal at 9:12 that morning, from a branch in Shadyside.

Forty thousand dollars, even.

The account had held fifty-one.

I called Patrick with the phone still in Tricia's hand.

He picked up on the second ring, and he was laughing at something before he even said hello.

"Where's the forty thousand, Patrick?"

"Relax. It's an investment."

"In what?"

"You'll hear about it," he said. "Mom's birthday is Saturday. You're not on the list."

He hung up.

Tricia set the phone down on the swing between us very gently.

"I'm going to kill him," she said. "I know where all the arteries are."

That afternoon I opened a new account at a different bank and moved my direct deposit into it.

It didn't take long.

I should have done it in July.

On Saturday night, the country club ballroom was all white roses and candlelight.

It was his mother's sixty-fifth birthday.

Ninety guests, a string trio, and a cake five tiers high with pearls piped down the sides.

I wasn't on the list.

I came anyway, in my navy dress, holding a piece of construction paper folded in half.

Nellie had made it at Tricia's kitchen table that morning with her tongue between her teeth.

It was Nana in a purple crown, with a lot of glitter glue.

"Give it to her yourself, Mama," she'd said. "So she sees it."

The man at the door didn't stop me.

I'd been his mother's daughter-in-law for seven years, and everybody here knew my face.

I came in just as the trio stopped playing.

Patrick was standing beside the cake with a glass in his hand.

He tapped it with a knife.

"Before we cut this," he said, "I want to do something I should've done a long time ago."

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