Lena. I tried to place the name and couldn’t. That made it worse in a small, practical way. I had no face to attach to it, no conversation to remember differently. Just a woman’s name on a trip my husband had paid for with money we kept for something going wrong.
I clicked the download button. The file appeared in the corner of the screen, and I opened it to make sure it had saved. I was ashamed of how quickly I had thought to keep a copy. Minutes earlier, I had wanted a receipt that would let us eat dinner. Now I wanted something that couldn’t disappear from the account before morning.
The shower stopped upstairs.
I listened without moving. A cupboard opened, then shut. I could still go to him. Two names on a reservation did not tell me everything, and I knew how quickly fear could supply the missing parts. I wasn’t ready to say what kind of trip this was.
But he had told me to stop looking at money that belonged to both of us. I didn’t owe him a closed laptop.
There was a separate link for the invoice. I opened it.
The arrival date was the following Friday. Close enough that I looked toward the calendar on the fridge, where I had written a reminder to buy laundry detergent. I hadn’t known he was going anywhere.
Below the deposit was another line: Balance payable upon arrival: $4,200.
I pressed my feet against the kitchen floor. Six thousand dollars altogether. I checked the addition, although it hardly needed checking. Eighteen hundred already paid, forty-two hundred still due.
I had been thinking about how we would replace the money he’d taken. The invoice was asking a much larger question.
Near the bottom, under payment details, were the last four digits of my personal credit card.
I knew those digits. That card had been saved in my profile since the holiday I had booked for us. I pulled my wallet from my bag anyway and laid the card beside the laptop.
The invoice said Payment guarantee: card on file, followed by the same four digits.
I read the field again, then saved the invoice beside the confirmation. I didn’t yet know what the resort could charge or what changing that guarantee would involve. I knew only what the document showed: Caleb and Lena were the travelers, and my card was still attached to their unpaid stay.
Caleb came downstairs while my card was still beside the laptop. He stopped at the kitchen doorway, his hair wet, and looked at the screen before he looked at me.
“Who’s Lena?” I asked.
He pulled out the chair opposite mine but didn’t sit. “A client.”
“Your client is going to a resort with you on Friday?”
“It’s business development, Nora. You found the booking. Fine. That doesn’t mean you understand it.”
I turned the laptop toward him. He glanced at the names, then pushed it back with two fingers.
There was a version of this conversation I still wanted. He would explain the second name, show me something from work, and we would argue about the money instead. I was almost embarrassed by how little reassurance it would have taken.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going?”
“Because everything turns into this.” He gestured at the card and the screen. “An interrogation. Do you know how humiliating that is?”
I put my palm over the card.
“You used our emergency money. My card is guaranteeing another forty-two hundred dollars. What part am I not allowed to ask about?”
“Nobody is charging your card. It’s just what was saved.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
He finally sat, but only to lean toward me. “Lena is a client. You’re making something ugly out of a work trip.”
I wanted to ask him to prove it. Instead, I closed the laptop. He watched that happen with an expression that might have been relief, and I hated that I recognized it.
