The Fortune Inside Me

My husband cheated on me and still expected me to walk away from our marriage with nothing. That night I stood on the Trinity River bridge with my hands on the cold rail, ready to be done with all of it. I had one leg over when a small voice spoke up from inside my belly. Mom, stop. Don't do anything stupid. I froze. Seven months pregnant, standing on a bridge at midnight, and now I was hearing things. That almost made me laugh, which told me how far gone I really was. I'm serious. I'm reborn, okay? I know how that sounds, but you need to hear me out. In my last life, that garbage you married kicked us both out so he could be with his mistress. And a few years later he won eighty million dollars in the lottery. Somehow that made it worse. He got to be rich and happy while I ended up in the river. My fingers loosened on the rail. Mom, listen to me. I know the winning numbers. We can get to them before he does. You absolutely cannot die tonight. The voice was young but it talked with this incredible confidence, and it knew things nobody could know. And forget the lottery for a second. Right now what matters is the vent in his walk-in closet. He keeps a duffel bag behind the grille. We take that money first, then we divorce him. My legs stopped shaking. My heart settled into something steady and cold. A week ago Damian Cross sat me down in the home office I had decorated myself and told me he wanted a divorce. He said it the way he announced layoffs, calm and reasonable, already ten steps past caring. When I asked what I was supposed to live on, he froze my credit cards while I was still sitting in front of him. He called it giving me time to cool off. What it did was cut off my food money so I would sign whatever he put in front of me. Seven years. I built that company with him when it was two desks in a rented strip mall office. I ate instant noodles for dinner so he could afford a second server. And now that Crossline was worth millions, he wanted me gone, and he wanted me gone with nothing but the clothes on my back. The baby was right. Dying would be doing him a favor. I climbed back over the rail. My knees were stiff and my dress was twisted around my belly, and a car going past honked at me, some stranger who would never know what they had almost driven by. That's my mom, the voice said, and I could hear the relief in it. Now go home. Act normal. And Mom, when we get there, find a screwdriver. "What are you, my life coach now?" I muttered, wiping my face with my sleeve. I'm your son. I've done this once before, remember? You're the one who taught me to fight back. You just don't remember teaching me, because in that life I learned it watching you lose. I stood there on the sidewalk with the river wind pushing at my back, and something in my chest that had been numb for weeks finally moved. It wasn't hope exactly. It was closer to anger, and anger was better. Anger I could use. "Fine," I said. "Tell me everything on the way." I flagged a cab. The driver looked at my face, decided not to ask, and pulled into traffic. Okay, so here's the situation, Theo said, because by then I had decided his name was Theo, even if he didn't know it yet. The donor has been skimming money out of the company for two years. His partners have no idea. He converts it to gold and cash and keeps it in a duffel bag behind the vent grille in his closet. In the last timeline he used it to run off to the islands with Sienna after you died. "He was going to run?" He had it all planned. New names, new company, the whole thing. And Mom, it's about four million dollars. That's our money now. Four million. I pressed my palm flat against my belly and stared at the city lights smearing past the window. Damian wanted me to leave his house with a suitcase of old clothes. He was about to get his wish, in a way he would spend the rest of his life regretting. The cab turned onto our street. Our street. I almost laughed at myself for still thinking of it that way. The house sat at the end of the cul-de-sac with its perfect lawn and its perfect lighting, and somewhere inside its perfect walls was a duffel bag with my future in it. Marta the housekeeper opened the door before I could knock. She took one look at my swollen eyes and stepped aside without a word. Bless her, she had worked for us long enough to know when not to ask questions. "Is he home?" I asked. "Out. With her, I think." Marta dropped her voice on the last word, and her face did something careful and sympathetic that told me everyone in this house had known about Sienna Vaughn before I did. Of course they had. I went straight to the garage and found the stepladder and the screwdriver set from Damian's toolbox. My hands were steady. An hour ago I had been ready to die, and now I was doing burglary prep in my own garage, and I couldn't decide if that was insane or the sanest I had felt in months. Insane would be jumping, Theo said. This is just math. He stole from the company, we steal from him, and he can't report any of it without explaining where the money came from. It's perfect. I carried the ladder upstairs, locked the bedroom door, and looked at the vent grille high on the closet wall. "Alright, son," I said. "Let's see if you're really from the future."