Those weren’t the words of a seven-year-old. They were the words of a child who had been watching and listening and understanding far more than any child should ever have to.
I drove home that night in silence. No radio, no podcast—just Bria’s whisper on repeat in my skull. At 2:00 in the morning, I was still awake, sitting up in bed, scrolling through thirty-six wire transfer confirmations on my phone.
$2,250.
$2,250.
$2,250.
Thirty-six times. $81,000. Three years of overtime and rice and hot sauce and loneliness. And one question I couldn’t stop asking myself:
Where does Wade go?
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I took a personal day from work. Tuesday, I told my supervisor I had a dentist appointment, which was technically a lie, but at that point my conscience had bigger problems to deal with than a fake cavity. I drove to Salem and parked down the street from Wade’s house—the same ranch-style home that Sienna had picked out four years before Bria was born.
The house Sienna’s credit score had helped qualify for the mortgage on. The house where Sienna had painted the front door sage green because she said it set the right energy. Now the sage green was fading, and the energy it was setting was closer to abandoned storage unit. The porch railing was peeling. The gutters were stuffed with leaves from two autumns ago. The lawn—the lawn Sienna used to maintain so carefully that she once got into a fifteen-minute debate with a neighbor about the correct height for fescue grass—was patchy and overgrown.
The whole yard had the energy of someone who quit a New Year’s resolution around February and never looked back.
I expected to find something ugly. Truly, I thought I was going to discover Wade had a drug problem or a gambling addiction or something destructive that would explain where $81,000 had gone. Something sad, maybe something that would at least make me feel pity alongside the anger.
That’s not what I found.
Wade left the house at 10:15 in the morning. He was not wearing his work uniform. He was wearing a fitted fall jacket I’d never seen before—dark blue, looked brand new. He got into his truck and pulled out of the driveway with the casual confidence of a man with nowhere important to be and all the time in the world.
He didn’t drive toward any job site.
He drove forty minutes to Blacksburg near the Virginia Tech campus. He parked at a townhouse complex on a quiet tree-lined street, the kind of street where people put little potted plants by their front doors and the mailboxes are all the same color.
A woman came out of Unit 7—late 20s, auburn highlights, wearing a designer crossbody bag that I later learned costs about $400, which is roughly what I spend on groceries in a month. She walked up to Wade’s truck.
They kissed.
Not a peck. Not a greeting. A comfortable, familiar, lived-in kiss—the kind you share with someone who’s been in your life for months.
Her name was Kendra Feltz. I didn’t know that yet. I’d learn it soon enough.
They got into his truck together and drove to a brunch spot two blocks away.
I sat in my Kia Sorento with my hands shaking so badly that I accidentally leaned on the horn. I had to pretend I was waving at someone across the parking lot. There was absolutely no one across the parking lot—just me performing for an audience of zero, which honestly summed up the last three years of my life pretty well.
Here’s what broke me.
I expected destruction. What I found was comfort.
Wade hadn’t fallen apart without Sienna. He hadn’t spiraled. He’d just replaced his family. He built a whole new life with my money and slotted a new woman into the space Sienna left behind. He was eating eggs benedict at 11:00 on a Tuesday morning while his daughter wore shoes that were splitting at the seams.
Over the next several days, I started pulling on every thread I could find.
I called Bria’s elementary school. Sienna—because of course she did—had listed me as Bria’s emergency contact when she enrolled her. That meant the school could legally share information with me, especially concerns about a child’s welfare.
And they had concerns.
Bria had eleven absences that semester. The school had been trying to reach Wade. Phone calls, voicemails, emails. He responded to exactly none of them. The attendance office told me they were close to filing a report with social services.
Then I talked to Patty Gorman.
Patty lived three doors down from Wade with her husband and her daughter who was Bria’s age. Patty was relieved—almost tearfully relieved—that someone was finally asking questions. She told me that Bria showed up at her house after school at least three times a week hungry. Not “I want a snack” hungry. Hungry like she hadn’t eaten since the school lunch that was included in her free meal program.
Patty had been feeding Bria dinner on those nights.
She said Bria once told her daughter, very matter-of-factly, that “Daddy is always at his other house.”
Seven years old, and she already understood the concept of another house.
I traced back Wade’s employment. I called the HVAC company where he’d worked for six years. They told me he’d left seven months ago. He wasn’t fired. He just stopped coming in. But when I asked more questions, a clearer picture came together.
Before he quit entirely, Wade had been reducing his hours for months—showing up late, leaving early, taking long lunches. The decline started roughly ten to twelve months ago, which lined up with when the relationship with Kendra must have begun. He met someone, started spending more time with her, pulled away from work gradually, and eventually just stopped going.
For seven months, Wade Purcell had zero income.
He was living entirely on my wire transfers.
$2,250 a month.
Money I broke my back to earn. Funding a life he was too comfortable to work for.
I tried to approach Lorraine carefully. I called her, kept my voice casual, asked how Wade was doing, whether Bria needed anything for school.
Lorraine’s voice went tight immediately. She said Wade was doing his best under impossible circumstances and that I didn’t understand what it’s like to raise a child alone.
But then she said something that snagged in my ear like a fish hook.
She said, “I’m there as much as I can be. I do what I can.”
That wasn’t a defense of Wade.
That was a confession.
Lorraine was picking up his slack. Watching Bria on the days he disappeared to Blacksburg. Making sure the house was passable when I came for my scheduled visits. Calling Wade to warn him when I was on my way so he could play his part.
She wasn’t his ally. She was his cleanup crew.
And she was exhausted.
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