“If you want to leave now, I won’t blame you.”
I stared at him for several seconds.
Then I stood up and walked into my bedroom.
A few moments later, he heard drawers opening.
Then he heard a suitcase being unzipped.
When I returned, his face looked devastated.
He thought his children had been right.
The money was gone, and now I was leaving too.
But William had no idea whose things I was packing… or what I was really planning to do.
The continuation is in the comments 👇‼️
I came back carrying two bags.
William stared at them.
“These are yours,” I said.
“What?”
“You brought some clothes here yesterday. I packed them. Tomorrow we’ll get the rest.”
He looked completely confused.
I pointed toward the couch.
“It folds out. You’ll sleep here for now.”
“Sophie, you don’t understand. I’m telling you there may be no money anymore.”
“And I’m telling you the couch folds out.”
For the first time that evening, he laughed.
But I wasn’t joking.
My apartment had one bedroom, four mismatched chairs, and a twelve-year-old car.
Some months, I counted the days until payday.
But it was my life.
And I wasn’t ashamed of it.
That night I told him,
“If you really lost everything, then we live differently. I have a job. You have your pension. We’ll manage.”
He looked at me.
“What about Italy?”
We had planned a trip there.
“We won’t go.”
“The restaurants?”
“We’ll eat at home.”
“And what if I can never give you the life I could before?”
That question annoyed me.
“William, I fell in love with you when I thought you were an ordinary retired man who drank black coffee and read books. What do you want me to say?”
The next morning, I took him to a small clothing shop near my apartment.
William was used to custom-made clothes.
I stood beside a discount rack holding up a blue shirt.
“This one will look good on you.”
He smiled.
That became our new life.
He stayed with me.
We cooked dinner at home.
We watched movies on Saturday nights.
I went to work in the mornings, and sometimes he waited for me in the park so we could walk home together.
Eventually, I took a second job two evenings a week.
William hated that.
“You don’t need to do this.”
“Yes, I do. Electricity doesn’t get paid with romance.”
He laughed.
But then I noticed something strange.
His children had almost disappeared.
Before William supposedly lost his money, they called constantly.
Now they barely called at all.
Near the end of the second month, I called Diane.
