He let out a breath he’d been holding.
“That’s good,” he said. “Really. The teacher said you were taken to the hospital, and then the office lady called me down and said my grandma couldn’t come get me, so I had to ride with Mr. Lee.” He swallowed. “I was so shocked my heart nearly stopped.”
Ryan is usually mature for his age, but in that moment he was just a scared ten-year-old boy in a school hoodie that was slightly too big, clutching his mother’s hand.
Seeing him like that lit something in me.
I have to get better, I thought. Not for Greg. For this child.
But my condition turned out to be worse than I’d imagined. After several tests, the doctor came back with a folder of results.
“You’re dealing with more than stress,” he said gently. He explained my diagnosis in careful, simple terms. It was serious, but treatable with surgery.
“You should have surgery as soon as possible,” he advised. “Please make a decision quickly.”
My first thought wasn’t, What if something happens to me?
It was, How much will this cost?
But when I looked at Ryan’s anxious face, I knew there wasn’t really a choice.
Following the doctor’s advice, I signed the consent forms. They wheeled me into an operating room with bright lights and cold air that smelled like antiseptic.
When I woke up, groggy and sore, Ryan was there asleep in a chair, his head lolling to the side, his backpack on the floor, and a nurse was quietly adjusting my IV.
By the time I was discharged and stepped back outside into the pale spring sunlight, it had been a full month since Greg had left.
We took a cab home because I wasn’t allowed to drive yet. Our little cul-de-sac looked almost exactly the same as when I’d gone into the hospital. Kids were riding bikes, a neighbor was mowing his lawn, and two houses down someone had hung a red, white, and blue bunting across their porch.
The world hadn’t stopped for my crisis.
I opened our mailbox, expecting junk flyers and maybe a get-well card from work.
Instead, a thick envelope with the finance company’s logo stared back at me.
My hands went cold.
Inside was a demand letter for the car loan payment, formal and unforgiving.
We have not received your recent payment…
I frowned.
The repayment should have been automatically deducted from my account. That was how I’d set it up.
Panic crawled up my spine.
Back inside the house, I grabbed my purse, fumbled out my debit card, and told Ryan I’d be right back. I drove slowly, carefully, to the grocery store down the road and went straight to the ATM next to the Redbox machine.
The machine whirred. The screen blinked. My balance appeared in bold numbers.
$33.90
A cold buzzing filled my ears.
Before the hospital, there had been around twenty thousand dollars in that account. That money was my safety net, my decade of putting away a little each paycheck, skipping Starbucks runs, ignoring Target home décor aisles, and saying “maybe next year” to vacations.
Twenty thousand dollars.
Gone.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.”
Standing there in the fluorescent glow of a suburban grocery store, between a cart return and a display of discount cereal, I felt my knees go weak.
Greg did this.
He knew my online banking passwords. He’d helped me set them up.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to call him and say all the things I hadn’t said before. But I couldn’t even get his voicemail to pick up anymore. His number went straight to a robotic message: This subscriber is not available.
Since I didn’t even have the camper van in my possession, I couldn’t sell it to cover the loan. Legally, the debt was mine. Practically, the asset was in his hands.
After Greg left, everything seemed to tilt in a bad direction, and my moods sank deeper and deeper like a stone thrown into a lake.
Back home, Ryan found me on the couch, still holding my purse, staring at nothing.
He walked over and put his small hand on my forehead.
“You look pale,” he said. “Are you feeling sick again? You don’t seem to have a fever though.”
I set the purse aside and pulled him closer.
“I’m fine physically,” I said, though my voice wobbled. “But you see… your father not only took the camper van, he also took all the money we had saved. I can’t work full-time yet because of my condition, and now we have almost no money. I’m at a loss.”
He was quiet for a moment, processing.
“I see,” he said finally.
He straightened up a little, his expression tightening in a way that made my heart ache.
“Then I’ll deliver newspapers,” he said. “And I’ll search the internet to see if there’s any work I can do. Maybe walking dogs, or raking leaves, or something kids can do.”
“Ryan,” I murmured, my eyes burning. “You’re ten.”
“And?” he asked. “Ten-year-olds can help.” He shrugged. “You always help me with homework. I can help with money. We’re a team, right?”
Encouraged and humbled by my ten-year-old son’s determination, I told myself this wasn’t the time to collapse.
“I’m sorry for worrying you,” I said, brushing his hair back. “I can’t afford to be weak. I’ll change my mindset and try to do whatever I can.”
I tried to smile, and this time it felt a little more real.
Ryan smiled back, his eyes glinting with something sharper than just childish optimism. Then he said something completely unexpected.
“Let’s plan how to get the camper van back from Dad,” he said.
“How can we do that?” I asked, taken aback.
“The camper van is in your name, right?” he said.
“Yes,” I answered slowly. “On all the paperwork, it’s mine. But what about it?”
“Then maybe we can use that,” Ryan said.
He leaned closer, lowering his voice like we were plotting a heist, not trying to clean up someone else’s mess.
Ryan started to suggest an idea that I couldn’t even imagine. As he laid it out, step by step, I realized he’d been thinking about this longer than I had.
“Also,” I said, when he finished, “I have no idea where your father is. That’s the problem.”
“Then let’s check on my phone,” Ryan said.
A month ago, before everything exploded, we’d gone hiking in the foothills as a family. Ryan had wandered a little too far up a side trail and, for a few terrible minutes, we couldn’t find him.
He’d emerged a few minutes later, a little shaken but mostly annoyed at us fussing. Afterward, on a coworker’s suggestion, we bought him a kid’s cell phone and installed a GPS app on it. Both Greg and I could check his location from our phones.
“With this app, I can see where Dad is in real time,” Ryan explained, opening it with a practiced swipe. “You and Dad both logged in on your phones too. I kept the login.”
On the screen, a small blue dot pulsed.
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