I turned toward my husband.
“What does she mean?”
He remained silent.
“ANSWER ME!”
Finally, he whispered:
“I sold my father’s watch collection.”
I froze.
His father had died twenty years earlier.
Those watches were the only valuable things he had inherited.
He had always said he would never sell them.
“They were worth almost ninety thousand dollars,” he continued. “I used part of the money to pay for Lily’s surgery.”
I looked at the fifty thousand dollars on the table.
“And this?”
“It’s what’s left. I wanted you to have it. I know we were saving for your dream house by the lake.”
My eyes filled with tears.
“But why did you say you didn’t want anyone to know what you’d done to Emma?”
He looked ashamed.
“Because I asked her to keep everything secret. I put that burden on her. I made her lie to her own mother.”
