My name is Dorothy Patterson. I’m sixty-four years old, a widow of two years, a former certified financial investigator for the IRS, and until very recently, the silent backbone of a family that took my help for granted. For thirty-two years, I lived in a world of numbers and lies.
I tracked shell companies, fake invoices, under-the-table cash, and people who swore they were “barely getting by” while hiding more money than they could spend in a lifetime.
I saw what greed did to people. I also saw what desperation did.
Most of the time, those two things looked disturbingly similar. I met my husband, Tom, long before any of that hardened me.
He was a high-school history teacher with a crooked smile and a talent for making any story sound like a legend.
We built a quiet life in a modest house on the edge of town, raised our son Michael and our daughter Anna, paid our taxes, and tried to do right by people. When Tom died unexpectedly from a heart attack two years ago, I felt like someone had taken a pair of scissors to the invisible thread that held my life together. We had been married for forty years.
Suddenly, there was just his side of the closet, his empty chair in the living room, and a life insurance policy I had never wanted to cash.
The policy was for four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Tom had insisted on it years earlier.
“If something happens to me,” he used to say, “I want you and the kids to be taken care of. I don’t want you to worry about money on top of everything else.”
For months after his death, I left the envelope with the policy in Tom’s desk drawer, untouched.
It felt like blood money.
Like spending it would somehow mean I had accepted he was gone. But grief doesn’t stop the bills. Michael’s student loans didn’t magically disappear.
Anna had her own family in another state, and I refused to lean on her.
And then there was Michael himself—a good man with terrible luck and even worse taste in women. Michael became a teacher like his father.
He was brilliant in the classroom and utterly naïve in the real world. He believed people meant what they said.
He believed love could fix anything.
He believed red flags were just people “going through a phase.”
Which brings us to Jennifer. I met Jennifer three and a half years ago at a Fourth of July barbecue. She floated into my backyard in a white sundress and oversized sunglasses, the kind of woman who looked like she’d stepped out of a lifestyle blog.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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