Six Winters In A Room With Water Stains While A Card I Refused To Touch Sat Inside A Box

The balance was two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars. The account had been receiving a monthly deposit since the week our divorce was finalised, every month, without fail, seventy-two of them. The envelope held six years of statements and one letter in Ambrose’s handwriting, lodged with the branch under instruction to be released only when I came in person.

He had been ill when he left. He had known for four months by the day at the courthouse and had told nobody, including our children. The letter said he could not bear to make me a nurse for the second half of my life after I had spent the first half raising his family, and that he had chosen to be remembered as a man who walked away rather than one I had to watch disappear. He wrote that he had put in everything he earned and everything he sold, and that he had said four thousand because he knew I would refuse a number that sounded like an apology.

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Aria Lexicon is the pen name of the writer and editor behind The Daily Signal, a site for original short fiction about families, grudges, awkward neighbors and the small decisions that turn into big ones. Every story is invented; every character is made up. When She isn't writing, She's reading other people's stories and trying to figure out why the good ones work.

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