…”collecting that money? Because I’ve sent nearly sixty thousand dollars.”
The woman’s name was Rachel. She’d met my husband, Steve, seven years earlier at a conference. He told her he was a widower whose wife had died in childbirth and that his elderly mother was raising his baby daughter. He said he was too heartbroken to introduce Rachel to the child yet. He gave her a bank account “in his mother’s name” for monthly support.
My mother-in-law had been dead for four years.
Steve tried to say we should all “sit down and talk like adults.” Rachel handed the baby to me without thinking, as if I were the safest person in the room, and slapped him. Then she apologized to me for that, which made us both laugh in a strange, broken way.
We sat on her porch for two hours that night while Steve waited in his car. We compared calendars. His “Friday meetings” were her family nights. His “business trips” were vacations with both of us, a week apart. The account in his “mother’s” name led to a gambling app.
And the girl in my daughter’s class? Rachel’s niece. The photo she showed my daughter was from a family barbecue.
Rachel and I hired lawyers together. Because Steve had used a false story to get money from her, her lawyer reported it as fraud. My lawyer used the same evidence in our divorce. Steve was ordered to repay Rachel and pay child support for all three children.
Neither of us took him back. He lives in a small apartment now and sees his children, separately, on supervised weekends, until a court decides he can be trusted.
The strangest thing is that Rachel and I became friends. Our kids are half-siblings. My daughter adores her baby brother and his older sister. Every few weeks, the five of us have pizza together on Friday nights, the very night Steve used to steal from both of our families.
We call it “Friday Meeting.” The kids think it’s a real business event. They insist on name tags.
