“I know it sounds crazy.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy, Layla. It is crazy.” He threw his keys on the counter. “Do you know what I could’ve done with that money? Do you have any idea? Index funds. A down payment on a rental property in Charlotte. Paying off the car. Twenty years of compound interest. That was our retirement. That was our future.”
“It was my grandmother’s money.”
“And now it’s a pile of rotting wood in the mountains,” Declan said.
My name is Layla Hart. I’m thirty-eight years old.
I’m a second-grade teacher at Piedmont Elementary in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve taught for fourteen years. I make forty-nine thousand dollars a year. I drive a Honda with a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it and a dent in the back bumper from a parking lot at Target.
I’ve been married to Declan Hart for eleven years.
We met at a friend’s barbecue in Raleigh. He was the guy standing by the grill explaining the Roth IRA to somebody’s uncle who clearly didn’t want to hear about it. I thought he was the most serious man I’d ever met.
Then he burned a hot dog to a crisp while explaining compound interest, and he laughed so hard at himself he had to sit down.
I married him two years later.
He’s a financial analyst. He’s careful. He’s good with money. He’s always been good with money. He has a spreadsheet for everything. Our groceries. Our gas. Our electric bill. The exact amount we need to save every month to retire at sixty-two.
I used to think it was sweet.
Lately, I’m not so sure.
I know the place is a wreck.
I’m not stupid. I drove up and saw it before I made the offer.
Peeling paint. Broken windows. Two of them in the front, boarded over with plywood that’s turned gray and soft from the rain. Weeds everywhere. Waist-high in the front yard. Growing up through the cracks in the front walk. Kudzu climbing the side of the house like it’s trying to swallow it.
The front porch sags in the middle. The gutters are hanging off on one side. There’s a tree branch on the roof from some storm that nobody ever cleared.
But God, I loved that house. 