That night, I placed the egg on the kitchen table and waited.
When Julian walked in, he stopped cold. “Nora…” he began.
I didn’t yell; I just asked, “How much?” His shoulders fell.
“Fifteen thousand. I thought it was real.
A coworker said it was an ancient relic from the Tang Dynasty.
I wanted to flip it, make enough for your mom’s treatments… for our trip.” My anger cracked under the weight of his shame.
He’d been trying to fix things — clumsily, desperately — out of love. “You buried it?” I whispered.
“I panicked,” he said, voice breaking. “Didn’t want you to know I’d been fooled.” I sat beside him, sighing.
“You can’t hide your failures from me, Julian.
That’s not how marriage works.”
Weeks later, the police caught the scammers.
We got a small refund — not much, but enough to remind us we’d survived worse. We decided to keep the egg, polishing it clean and setting it under the oak tree as a monument to lessons learned.
Friends would laugh and ask, “What’s that?” Julian would grin and answer, “A reminder that some treasures aren’t worth digging for.” And every time I saw it glinting in the sunlight, I remembered that day — the panic, the lies, the forgiveness.
Because love isn’t about perfection or profit. It’s about the mess, the laughter, the stupid choices we recover from together.
That black egg became our story — proof that sometimes, when you dig deep enough through the dirt, you find what truly matters: not gold, not relics, but the heart that still chooses to stay.
