What the hell, Sabrina thought. You’re kind of sending me mixed messages, she typed back. First you said you didn’t want this to be public. Actually i think you said you wanted me to talk to Dan and ask him to kill the story. So which is it?
I know, Isabel texted back immediately. Listen…think about it. I’m obviously not gonna be at work tomorrow.
Sabrina was in front of her building now. Ok. I’m home…i gotta run. Isabel didn’t respond. Sabrina climbed the two flights of stairs to her apartment and opened the front door. Dan was sitting on the couch, working on his laptop. The apartment was quiet. Was it possible he had put the kids to bed all by himself? “Hey,” she said. “Everything okay?”
“Yup!” he said. “Everything’s great. Gave them a bath and put them to bed. How was your work thing?” Why was he being so…cheery? Something felt off.
She sat down on the couch next to him. “It was fine.” Dan nodded and turned back to his computer. “What are you up to?”
“Not much, just finishing up some work stuff.” He quickly closed his laptop. “So…something a little weird happened last night.”
“Oh?” Sabrina felt immediately on guard. “When you went out?” They’d barely seen each other since then, Sabrina realized. When he’d gotten home, she’d been asleep, and then this morning he’d left as she was getting Owen and Amelia ready for school, giving them a quick wave good-bye as she was trying to get Owen to sit in his chair and not roll around on the floor with no pants on, which Owen thought was hilarious.
“Yeah. I forgot my wallet, which I didn’t realize right away because I had Ubered, but for some reason I had a credit card in my jacket pocket—I was wearing that brown corduroy blazer that I don’t wear that much?” She nodded. She thought she knew where this was going and she knew she couldn’t stop it, and she was getting that terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach again, the one that she usually felt anytime she looked at a credit card bill. Which was why she had stopped looking at her credit card bills. “So I was getting drinks—”
“You got drinks? I thought you had a work thing.”
“Yeah, they were, like, drinks with some work people.”
“Okay.” She briefly considered challenging him on this—he sounded like he was lying about something, although she wasn’t sure exactly what.
“Anyway, so I forgot my wallet, but I realized I had that Delta SkyMiles card in my pocket, so I tried to use it, and it got declined.” He paused as though waiting for her to say something. She was silent, because she was trying to figure out how she was supposed to play this. She hadn’t paid the SkyMiles card in months—when the cash started coming into her PayPal account from selling her underwear, it had first gone to the Barneys and J. Crew cards, and she had been planning on getting to the SkyMiles card and the other AmEx and the Citibank Visa soon, but between everything that had been going on at work and her side job—because that’s what selling her underwear was, a second job that she had to pay attention to—she just hadn’t had the time. “Which I thought was weird, because we hardly ever use that card. I’m actually not totally sure why we even have it—it’s not like we fly that much.”
“We got it so we could get all those bonus miles, remember? So we could go visit your brother in San Francisco.”
“Oh yeah, right,” Dan said. “That was, like, three years ago, though.” Sabrina nodded. She was going to try to placate him, she decided. Play a little dumb and slightly confused, not really argue, and hope that it would all go away. “Anyway, the card was declined. So I called that number on the back?”
Okay. Maybe playing confused wasn’t going to work. She closed her eyes. “Just get it over with,” she murmured.
“Huh?” Dan said. He shook her shoulder. “Are you okay? What did you just say?”
She opened her eyes. “Whatever you’re about to say, just say it. Get it over with.”
He squinted at her. “What am I about to say?”
“Don’t do this, Dan.”
“No, seriously, I want to know. What am I about to say? Please enlighten me.”
Was she going to cry? She might cry. But maybe…maybe there was something that would feel liberating about coming clean. The burden of this secret was wearing her down. When she got married, she had been convinced that there was nothing she would keep secret from her husband; they were a team. But somewhere along the line it had started feeling more like they were like a bad physics problem: She was a train going ninety-five miles per hour and he was a train going a hundred and fifty miles per hour, and they were heading toward each other and now they were going to crash. But exactly when or where or how they were going to crash…that was what she had to solve for, and she had gotten a C+ in physics in high school.
“I don’t know,” Sabrina said. “Maybe…maybe something about how the card hadn’t been…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Hadn’t been paid. Is that what you were going to say? Because that’s what they told me when I finally pressed the right combination of numbers to get to a representative. They said that the card had reached its limit three months ago and it hadn’t been paid. Not even the minimum. And do you know what the limit is on that card?”
Sabrina shook her head. She actually truly didn’t know. She’d made it a point not to know.
“It’s twenty grand,” Dan said. “Twenty thousand dollars. Of which I personally have spent zero, to my knowledge. So, Sabrina, tell me. Where the hell did you spend twenty thousand dollars?”
“It’s…it’s complicated,” she whispered.
“Complicated how, exactly.” He wasn’t raising his voice, but his tone had gotten sharper. Meaner.
“It…it didn’t happen all at once, I mean.” She paused. “And I’m trying to pay it off. Really. I was trying to take care of it myself. I didn’t want to stress you out.”