a lot of things that haven’t turned out so well,” she finally said. “I talked to our financial advisor.”
Kevin’s face paled. “June told you? She said—”
“No, she wouldn’t tell me.” Kristine had to fight to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “I had to call our advisor and ask him myself. Humiliating, considering one would think a husband would tell his wife if seventy percent of the retirement account was suddenly gone.”
At the words, her stomach clenched, as it had many times over the past few days.
The phone call to their financial advisor had been devastating, even before she’d heard that news. Kristine had asked him for the financial records for the previous five years, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and danced around his questions about whether or not everything was all right. She’d been shocked to learn that everything was not all right. Apparently, they’d taken a huge hit a few years back, when Kevin had switched their retirement fund to an aggressive approach.
Studying the papers, Kristine couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Even though she’d always been diligent about the store’s financials, Kevin had been the one to handle their personal finances. And why not? He was the one making the money. Besides, he’d always brought the major decisions to her. She was stunned that, in this case, he hadn’t. Staring down at the numbers, his behavior over the past few years began to make sense.
Yes, Kevin had always been a hard worker but his devotion to his new job had been so confusing. He’d said he owed the company for giving him a job at a time where no one else would, but apparently, there was something bigger driving him to stay employed. According to the numbers, if his current job hadn’t kept him around, they would have spent the rest of their lives scrambling just to get by.
“For the past few years, I have been trying to understand why you would want to spend so much time away from me, away from our family,” Kristine said. “When you could have just told me—”
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said.
“Why?” she demanded. “I am your wife! I have the right to know if—”
“Because I felt like such a loser,” he cried. At the look of raw shame on his face, she stared down at the table. The only sound was his labored breathing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that he was clenching his hands so hard that his knuckles had turned white. “I’ve spent my whole life working hard, trying to make something out of myself. I gave us a good life, then . . .” His voice cracked. “How do you think I felt, when I’d given my whole life to one company and then they let me go?”
Kristine looked at him in surprise. Even though she’d tried, many times, to get him to discuss this, he’d always refused. Now, he was staring down at his hands, the tips of his ears bright red.
“Kevin,” she said, her voice gentle. “It was the econ—”
“Bullshit.” He ran his hand over his face. Giving a sharp sniff, he looked her in the eye. “There are still lots of guys who used to be my friends who still have their jobs. Why didn’t they get let go?”
“Because,” she said. “They . . . They hadn’t been there for twenty years, they weren’t making the type of money you were, they . . .” She didn’t know the answer and suddenly realized that maybe there wasn’t one. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it wasn’t your fault.”
“I did everything right,” he said, shaking his head. “But that’s the thing that gets me. Because in the end, what did it matter? After all that planning, all that playing it safe, I still found myself struggling to find money to take care of my family. After I got this job, I thought I’d make a big move, make the money we lost back and make you proud of me again. Instead . . .” His voice trailed off and the muscle in his jaw worked, the way it always did when he was too scared to show emotion.
Kristine felt her eyes smart with tears. “I was always proud of you,” she whispered. “You gave us such a good life. I can’t believe you didn’t just talk to—”
He shrugged. “I wanted to tell you. But I was afraid you’d leave.”
“You thought I’d leave you?”