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“Of course you can,” he said. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Don’t ever feel as if you can’t talk to me about things.”

“Okay,” she said. “I love that you want to help me. And push me. I’ve got to get it in my head that it’s not pity. I love what I’m doing career wise now. I think it might have been my calling to mix my schooling with a passion. I don’t know if I could do my baking full time, but I feel as if I’ve found the best of both worlds. I couldn’t have done that without you.”

“You could have,” he said. “If you really wanted to and the opportunity came up. I think the truth is, the opportunity didn’t come up until you moved here.”

“Sometimes you need to hit the bottom in order to rise back to the top.”

“If this was your bottom, then be grateful,” he said. “There are people who have it much harder. I know that. I’ll always have the safety net of my family and friends around me. You’ve got that too. That isn’t you taking advantage of them either. I hope you don’t think that.”

“It’s funny you say that. There is always a part of me that worried someone would feel that way.”

“Don’t worry about other people. You know the real reasons for things and that is all that should matter.”

She nodded her head and moved out of his arms. “I do. And I think I feel better that we’ve talked now. I’m ready to tell you about the call.”

“Can’t wait to hear this. And sorry I tried to take the phone from you. No one should have to deal with that.”

“I wanted to hear what she had to say. I think I told you Cheryl has a couple of kids from different men, right?”

“Briefly,” he said. “That Eddie’s parents were always helping her and not him. That is why you gave him so much money. And you never said it was that much.”

“Because I felt like a fool. He all but drained my savings and then loaded up my credit card debt on top of it. It was about nineteen thousand dollars total. It’s not like I thought he’d give it all back to me. But I needed help with the credit cards more than the savings.”

It was about seven from her savings, twelve from her credit cards. Then the interest on it and it felt like it wasn’t getting knocked down fast enough.

“What was it that Cheryl was saying?” he asked. “Or screaming at you about?”

“She said that she was going through Eddie’s things and found a bank statement. It’d been forwarded to his parents’ house and she was living there now. She opened it.”

“That’s low,” he said.

“Nothing surprises me with her. She said there was a little over twelve thousand dollars in it. She went to get the money and the bank told her no. She’d shown his death certificate, but they’d said there was another name on the account. It’s mine.”

“Did you know that?” he asked.

“I forgot. Or I didn’t realize it completely. When this was all happening, I just wanted to pay Eddie’s bills for him. He said he wanted the money and he’d figure out what to pay. He was trying to balance his bills and medical costs too. I just thought maybe he didn’t want me to see the debt he had. I told you he liked to party and have fun when we were dating. He’d never been great with money and I knew that.”

“Sounds to me he just wanted the cash.”

“I didn’t think that. I wasn’t going to question him. I had no reason to. It’s not like we talked finances much. I had seen his medical bills, I knew he wasn’t working. He was out of sick time.”

She was probably naive but didn’t want to rock the boat with him either. He was going through so much and she was trying to be helpful more than anything.

“How did your name get on this account? Did you open it up together?”

“He opened it and I gave him my information. I thought it was so that the bank could know where the money was coming from that I was wiring. I signed something, but I didn’t look at it completely. That makes me sound stupid.”

Now she felt more like a fool that he had all this information from her. “You can’t change what happened. You know that now. Do you know the bank it’s at?”

“Yes. I do. I’ve got the account information somewhere because I was wiring him money. I was using my credit cards to pay my bills and that is part of the reason Eddie said that he wasn’t going to help. It was my problem and my expenses on those cards.”

“Asshole,” he said.

“There wasn’t much I could do. We had no written contract or anything. Why would I consider doing that? I was giving him money to help. We were in a relationship and I thought we loved each other. I never expected anything to turn out the way it did.”

“You could have gotten a lawyer,” he said.

She snorted. “With what money? I think he knew that. And before you say my parents would have helped, I know they would have, but I got myself into that mess and I needed to get myself out of it.”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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