Chapter 15 - THE FIRST OF THE MONTH
My divorce from Thaddius became final almost a year after Dorothia slapped me.
By then, the bruise was long gone.
The financial habits it exposed were not.
Thaddius kept his job.
He worked under tighter compliance oversight for a period and missed the promotion he had expected.
The Jersey City investment eventually produced a modest return.
Not the fortune he had imagined.
Enough to reduce his debt to Dorothia substantially under the settlement structure.
For once, the money went where everyone knew it was going.
Dorothia sold a vacation property in Palm Beach she had insisted for years she could never part with.
The proceeds cleared her personal credit line.
Apparently the emergency had always been partly about what she was unwilling to surrender.
Not what she lacked.
She never received another dollar from me.
Claire and I eventually repaired our relationship.
Carefully.
She stopped asking me to forgive her mother.
I stopped asking her to judge her brother.
That helped.
Dorothia and I did not reconcile.
We did something less dramatic and more sustainable.
We stayed away from each other.
Once, through Claire, she returned the original printed transfer statement from the night of the fight.
I almost threw it away.
Instead I gave it to Ellen for the closed file.
I didn't want it framed as a trophy.
Thaddius and I spoke occasionally after the divorce.
Taxes.
A piece of mail.
The sale of furniture neither of us wanted.
Then increasingly nothing.
The quiet hurt.
But it was honest quiet.
My business recovered from the bad quarter that had caused the first missed payment.
That irony stayed with me.
The entire family system had cracked because my company had temporarily needed fifteen hundred dollars more than Dorothia did.
One year after the divorce, I woke on the first business day of September.
My banking app sent a routine notification.
For nearly three years, the date had carried an automatic instruction:
$1,500 — DOROTHIA VOSS.
Now there was nothing.
I sat at my kitchen table with coffee and created a new recurring transfer.
$1,500.
Monthly.
Destination:
my own investment account.
I laughed after confirming it.
Not because money had won.
Because the same amount that once represented obligation now represented choice.
That evening, Thaddius emailed.
We had not spoken in almost two months.
Mom sold the penthouse. She's moving to Connecticut near Claire.
I stared at the screen.
Then another message appeared.
She finally admitted something to me last week. She said she hated you because you were willing to do for me what she had spent her whole life doing—and you made it look easy.
I read it twice.
Then:
I'm not telling you because I think it changes anything. It doesn't.
A final message followed.
I'm going to therapy. Not because a lawyer told me to. If there ever comes a day when you'd be willing to have coffee with me as two people who aren't fighting over money, I'd like that.
My first instinct was to answer.
My second was to delete it.
I did neither.
Outside my apartment windows, Manhattan was turning gold in the late-afternoon sun.
My phone sat beside a folder containing my latest quarterly business report.
Profitable again.
No secret transfers.
No debts disguised as gifts.
No family member deciding what information I could handle.
I opened my banking app once more.
The new recurring transfer was scheduled for the following month.
$1,500 — SERENA VOSS INVESTMENT ACCOUNT.
I closed the app.
Then I returned to Thaddius’s message.
Coffee was not reconciliation.
It was not forgiveness.
It was not marriage.
Maybe one day it would simply be coffee.
I still didn't know.
For the first time since I married into the Voss family, uncertainty did not feel like something I needed to fix.
May you like
So I left his message unanswered that night.
And let the next $1,500 belong entirely to me.
