I smiled.
“Because I wanted to know what they’d do if they thought there was more money coming.”
“And?”
“They did exactly what they’d done for four years.”
“What?”
“They looked at me and saw a bank account.”
Phedra was quiet.
Then she said, “They looked at me and saw an expense.”
That sentence stayed with me.
My family had not suddenly become greedy when I mentioned the settlement. The million dollars had not changed them.
It had revealed them.
Four years earlier, I had believed sending money home was the same thing as protecting my wife. It wasn’t. Money cannot protect someone if you hand control of it to the people hurting them. Trust is not protection when it is never verified.
I still carried guilt about that.
Phedra never let me turn guilt into self-punishment.
“You didn’t know,” she told me once.
“I should have.”
“You should have asked more questions.”
