I paid it.
All of it. The arrears, the penalties, the debts Frank had absorbed for his children. I emptied most of my own savings — the security I’d spent thirty years building — to save a house that would, by every arrangement Frank and I made, ultimately go to Brad and Stephanie.
I did it on one condition, which Frank begged me for and I agreed to: that the children never know.
“They’ll never respect me if they know I couldn’t provide,” Frank had said. “And they’ll never respect you if they think you’re holding it over them. Let them keep their pride, Patricia. Please.”
So I let them keep their pride.
And they spent the next nine years telling everyone I’d married their father for the house I had personally saved from foreclosure with my own life’s savings.
The box held all of it.
