“Okay,” I repeated. “Give me the keycard for the ground-floor room.”
“Really?” David extended the second keycard toward me. “You’re not upset?”
I smiled at him.
“Why would I be upset, David? You’ve made your priorities very clear.”
I accepted the keycard, gathered my three exhausted children, and headed toward the elevators.
I never looked back.
I already had a plan.
Behind me, I heard Beatrice let out a satisfied little hum.
David exhaled with relief.
They thought it was over.
Perfect.
Inside the elevator, my oldest looked up nervously.
“Mom, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, sweetheart,” I answered.
—
The ground-floor room was tiny.
The first thing I noticed was the smell of mildew drifting through the vents.
My oldest wrinkled her nose.
My middle child collapsed onto the bed and announced it felt like cardboard.
“Mommy, why is our room so dark?” my youngest asked, tugging on my sleeve.
“Because Grandma needed the pretty one, sweetheart,” I said gently. “But we’re going to make this fun. I promise.”
I settled them in front of the television with cartoons and snacks from my carry-on.
Then I opened my laptop on the shaky desk.
Something kept bothering me.
David never planned anything.
He’d forgotten my birthday two years in a row.
So how had he suddenly arranged a luxury tropical vacation?
It felt completely unlike him, and I had an awful feeling about how he’d paid for it.
I logged into our joint bank account.
What I found changed everything.
There it was.
A charge of three thousand two hundred dollars for the ocean-view suite.
Paid straight from our joint account — which meant it came from the work bonus I’d deposited.
Six exhausting weeks of overtime, only for David to spend part of it on a luxury suite I wasn’t even staying in.
Then I noticed another charge on David’s personal credit card.
The one he’d insisted was almost paid off.
A pending charge for the ground-floor family room.
Just under two hundred dollars.
My hands began trembling.
He hadn’t treated me to anything.
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