I didn’t have to.
He knew.
Instead, I pushed one of the utility statements toward him.
“Do you know what the electric bill was last winter?”
He glanced at the number.
“No.”
“Do you know what the property taxes are now?”
He looked at the next page.
“No.”
“Do you know how much I paid when the upstairs plumbing needed repair?”
His shoulders dropped.
“No.”
“That’s the problem.
You stopped knowing because I made sure you never had to know.”
He leaned back in his chair.
For a moment he looked less like the husband sitting silently beside Victoria and more like the little boy who used to come into this kitchen after school and tell me everything before he had even taken off his backpack.
“I didn’t realize it had gotten this bad,” he said.
“You didn’t want to realize.”
He flinched.
I hated that it hurt him.
But pain was not always cruelty.
Sometimes it was simply the feeling of finally touching a truth you had been avoiding.
“Why didn’t you say something sooner?” he asked.
I almost laughed.
Not because the question was funny.
Because I had asked myself the same thing all weekend.
“I should have,” I said.
“I kept thinking generosity would teach gratitude.
Instead, it taught everyone that I would always absorb the inconvenience.”
He looked at the folder.
“And the babysitting?”
“I will spend time with my grandson because I love him.
Sometimes I’ll offer to watch him.
Sometimes you can ask me, and I may say yes.
But I am not accepting a mandatory twenty-five-hour workweek.”
“Victoria says she needs consistency.”
“Then she needs a child-care arrangement that doesn’t depend on ordering another adult around.”
He nodded slowly.
Then he said something I had been waiting years to hear.
“I should’ve said something at the table.”
I looked at him.
“Yes.
You should have.”
No rushing to comfort him.
No telling him it was fine.
Because it had not been fine.
He stared at his hands.
“I knew the contract was too much.
She’d already made it before she showed you.
I told her maybe we should ask first.”
“And then?”
“She said you’d agree once you saw how organized it was.”
There was the arrogance in its purest form.
Not that Victoria believed I would happily accept.
She believed my consent was inevitable.
“You could have stopped it,” I said.
