I asked if he ever planned to tell me. He said he figured it would only hurt me for no reason.

The next few days we didn’t talk much. I still made dinner. He still went to work. The house felt smaller.

On Friday I handed him his check back. He looked at it and set it on the counter.

“You want me to close it?” he asked.

I didn’t answer right away. I was trying to figure out what closing it would even fix.

He said Tommy was working now and didn’t need as much anymore. The transfers had already slowed down some.

I told him I didn’t know what I wanted. That was the truth.

That night I lay in bed and kept seeing the number on the screen. Seventy eight thousand. Eight years of me thinking we were even.

Frank rolled over and said my name once. I didn’t answer. He didn’t say it again.

I still get up and make coffee every morning. The checkbook sits in the drawer. I haven’t opened it since.

Frank leaves for work the same time he always has. Sometimes he stops at the door like he might say something else. He never does.

I keep wondering what else I balanced wrong all those years. The number just sits there in my head and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.

I keep thinking back to that filing cabinet drawer and how it always stuck on the left side. I had to wiggle it twice before it would open all the way. The old statements smelled like dust and the bottom of a desk drawer that hadn’t been cleaned in years. I spread them out on the kitchen table and ran my finger down each line until the fifteenth jumped out at me again and again.

The bank call came first. The woman on the phone said “I’m sorry but that account isn’t listed under your name.” Her voice sounded like she was reading from a card. So I drove over with the marriage certificate folded in my purse. It was creased from years of being moved around the junk drawer.

The manager at the other branch looked at me over her glasses. She said “Are you sure you want to see the balance?” I told her I had been the one writing every check for thirty six years and I needed to know where the money went. She turned the monitor around slow. The number sat there glowing on the screen like it had always been waiting for me to look.