That's My Robe — The Military Wife Story Everyone Is Reading

Chapter 10 - The House That Is Mine

I called Brad that same night, before I could talk myself into being polite about it.

He answered on the second ring and said, "Rebecca, hey, how's it going," in the exact tone he uses when he wants you to think nothing has ever happened to anybody.

I said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to listen to the whole question before you answer.

Did you help Aaron open a savings account in April in his and Melissa's names, and did you keep the paperwork at your apartment, and did you cover for him with me twice when I called you from overseas."

There was a silence on his end long enough for me to hear his refrigerator hum.

Then he said, "Who told you."

I said, "That's a yes, Brad."

He said, "It's not what you think."

I said, "I didn't think anything about you an hour ago.

Now I know exactly one thing, and it's this: you helped my husband open a hidden account with his mistress, using money that came out of my pay.

That's the whole of what I know.

I don't need the rest."

He asked what I wanted.

I told him two things.

A written statement, dated and signed, of everything he did, and repayment of every dollar that went into that account from my deployment deposits.

He said, "I don't have that kind of money right now."

I said, "I know.

You'll figure it out.

You have a mortgage cosign on your record I can look at any time I want.

I'd rather not."

He asked if I was going to tell our parents.

I said, "I'm going to tell my mother.

That's my decision and it's already made."

He said, "I'll have the statement to you by Friday."

He had it to me on Wednesday.

The money came in two payments over the next nine days, and the second one was short, and I called him once and said so, and it wasn't short after that.

Aaron was served at his new apartment on a Wednesday, three weeks after the porch.

The apartment was in a town fifteen minutes east of post, and Melissa moved out of it six days after the papers arrived.

He is still paying that lease alone.

I know that because Melissa told my attorney in her deposition, which took ninety minutes and in which she never once looked at me except to say, at the very end, "I'm sorry," and I nodded, because I had nothing else to give her.

I will not pretend we became something.

We didn't.

We don't speak.

She has a new job two towns over.

I hope she keeps it.

The fraud referral reached Aaron's employer in June.

He had been up for a regional promotion; a supervisor called Nadia to confirm the referral was real, and the promotion went to someone else.

His settlement with me was written into the decree the way Nadia wanted it: no contest of the freeze, no claim on the house, and the loan on the truck was his to unwind with the bank.

He signed it.

He wasn't in a position to argue.

I kept one thing I came home with, and it wasn't the flowers.

I pressed the flowers between two sheets of paper that first week, because I couldn't throw them away and I couldn't throw them out, and one night they were simply flat.

Six months later, on a Saturday morning, I pulled the blue robe out of the closet and laid it on the bed in the daylight, and I looked at it the way I wanted to look at it, on a day I chose, in a house nobody else has a key to.

Then I folded it into the donation box on the porch and put the pressed flowers back on the shelf where I keep my deployment medals, because one of those came from me and the other one came from my mother, and neither one came from him.

My phone rang that afternoon while I was in the garage.

It was my mother.

She said, "Is the robe still hanging in your closet, honey?

I was thinking about it.

I want to see if you've worn it."

I sat down on the tailgate of the truck and told her I gave it away.

That it went to a shelter, along with three bags of clothes, on a morning I picked myself.

She went quiet and then she said, "Did you keep anything."

I looked at the shelf through the open garage door.

I said, "I kept something better.

I kept the morning I picked up the phone and the evidence instead of the gun."

She said, "Good girl."