Chapter 2
My hands were actually trembling on the leather steering wheel. I couldn’t wait to tell Michael. The anticipation was a living, breathing thing inside my chest, fluttering like a trapped bird. I couldn’t wait to see the exact moment his face registered the magnitude of what I had done. For years, we had talked about the “someday.” Someday we would take that three-week tour of New Zealand he was always reading about. Someday we would wipe out Sarah’s crippling law school debt with a single check. Someday we would spoil our grandchildren until our daughter begged us to stop. Someday, we would finally just breathe.
It was a Thursday afternoon, creeping up on three-thirty. The sky above Portland was a heavy, bruised gray, threatening rain, but the October leaves were putting on a brilliant, defiant show, coating the lawns in vibrant shades of crushed copper, burnt orange, and deep, blood red. Michael usually worked from home on Thursdays. He was a senior financial consultant, and Thursday was his dedicated day for deep-dive portfolio reviews and uninterrupted client calls from his home office.
