“What? You must be mistaken.”

“I’m afraid not.”

Her cheeks flamed. “I’m certain it’s an oversight.”

“Oh, I’m certain of that, too,” he said hastily. “As is Mr. Hancock. It’s just that…” He wrung his hands. “You understand.”

“Of course. Of course.”

She asked the amount of the balance due, and when he told her, her knees went weak. She opened her pocketbook and removed the small change purse in which she carried her nest egg money when she was on an errand.

She rapidly counted the bills folded inside it. They covered only half the amount owed to the store, but she gave what she had to Mr. Hamel. “I’ll bring you the rest later today.”

Still looking pained, he said, “Should I restock the goods on the counter?”

Aware of people nosily staring, she forced herself to smile. “I wouldn’t have you go to all that trouble. If you’ll please sack them up, I’ll pay cash for them when I return.” Then, with as much dignity as she could muster, she exited the store.

As promised, she returned with cash in an envelope addressed to Mr. Hancock. In it, she included a note of apology and assured him that it would never happen again.

But getting current with Hancock’s had taken a huge bite out of her nest egg.

She was loaded for bear when Irv came home for supper. But he looked weary to the core, and, without her even asking, he undertook the first to-do task on her list.

She didn’t have the heart to relate the humiliating experience she’d suffered, or to demand an explanation for the embarrassing delinquency. Perhaps he’d bitten off more than he could chew by renting the house. If so, whose fault was that? Hers.

Although it wasn’t like Irv to be absentminded, maybe the unpaid account had been a mere oversight. That night she went to bed praying that was the case.

However, the next day while he was away working, she entered his sanctum and opened the lidded cardboard box he referred to as his filing cabinet. To her dismay, several recent bills had balances carried over from previous months.

How had he gotten them into these straits? When he went out at night, was he gambling? He could have been lying when he denied seeing another woman. Was he supporting a mistress in addition to Laurel?

She couldn’t tell him how to live his life. But—to hell with his pride—she would relieve the financial burden she had become.

To supplement Derby’s paltry income from the army while he was overseas, she’d taken a job clerking in a drugstore. She’d enjoyed the sense of purpose and independence employment had given her.

But once Derby got back, he’d insisted she resign. He was the breadwinner, he’d said. Taking care of him would be her full-time job, he’d joked. After Pearl was conceived, the issue was never again addressed, not even when he couldn’t hold a job for more than weeks, sometimes days, at a time.

She was not going to give up another home in order to spare a man’s ego. If Irv couldn’t afford for them to live here on what he earned, then she would subsidize the household income. And not only for the short term, not just long enough to bring their bills current. She must begin thinking long range, to the time when Irv was too old and infirm to provide for her to any extent. She must plan for a future without him.

Without anybody.

Because she had resolved never again to hand over the reins of her life to someone else, as she’d done with Derby. She would be self-supporting, thank you.

Making that resolution was one thing, implementing it quite another, and she had no time to waste. Days passed, bills piled up. Without Irv’s knowledge, she went around to local vendors, paying them out of her nest egg only enough to pacify them and buy herself a little more time.

In secret, she began perusing the local newspaper’s want ads. She wasn’t qualified to teach school. The telephone company had more applications for operators than they had switchboards.

Other jobs open to women required secretarial skills like typewriting and shorthand. She could learn to do both, but not without Irv’s knowledge, and she didn’t want to raise the subject with him until she had something already in place, giving him no opportunity to argue with her about it.

She also began keeping count of the nights he left the house and how long he stayed away. He was entitled to a private life, of course. He was a man, after all. But if he was gambling money away, or spending it on a woman, or women, instead of keeping their household bills current, she had a right to her say-so on the matter.

She planned and prepared to follow him at a moment’s notice the next time he slipped out the back door.

The night arrived. When she heard the back door closing behind him, she hurried downstairs and watched him from the kitchen window as he climbed into his truck and drove away.

She rushed outside, frantically cranked up her car, and, miraculously, it started the first time. She followed the taillights of Irv’s truck, never getting too close. He had repaired the faulty headlight, so she didn’t have to worry about a winking one giving her away.

Once he cleared the streets of town, he took the familiar highway that led to the shack. Maybe he simply missed his solitude and came out here to be alone. But when they reached the drive leading up to the old place, he drove on past.

The farther they got from town, the more uneasy Laurel became. Where on earth was he going?

When he turned off the highway, Laurel dropped farther back and switched off her headlights before carefully taking the same turn. But her ploy didn’t work. She topped a rise, and, there in the middle of the road, was Irv’s truck. He was standing in front of the tailgate with his hands on his hips. She pulled to a stop.

He walked up to her car, scowling. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice I was being followed?”

“Where are you going?”

“Dammit, Laurel!”

“Where are you going?”

He stewed, cursed under his breath, then said, “You want to know so bad? Come on then.”

He stalked lopsidedly back to his truck, climbed in, and pushed it into low gear. After a couple of miles, he turned onto another road, narrower and more rutted than the previous one. It wound its way between the hills. As they rounded a curve, Laurel saw flickering firelight ahead.

Irv pulled his truck off the road and drove cross-country toward the fire. The old truck jounced over the rugged ground, its headlight beams eerily bouncing off stands of cedar trees and rock formations. Laurel, with her teeth clenched to keep them from being jarred loose, followed and pulled up behind him when he braked and killed his engine.