Husband paid eighty-seven dollars every month for a locked door in Elm Grove.

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5 – 7 minutes

We sat at the kitchen table on Maple Avenue, sorting the mail that had piled up by the ceramic breadbox. The pile was mostly junk, a glossy circular for the grocery store on Main Street, a flyer for a lawn care service, and the blue envelope containing our monthly bank statement. Mark was slicing a yellow Honeycrisp apple with his pocketknife, putting each wedge cleanly into his mouth with his thumb resting against the flat of the blade.

The kitchen was quiet except for the dry scraping of the steel against the small wooden cutting board. I held the bank statement in both hands, folding the top corner down so the crease aligned perfectly with the oak edge of the table. It was our joint checking account, the one we used for the mortgage, the electric bill, and our weekly groceries.

There was a recurring charge of eighty-seven dollars on the twelfth of every month, listed under an abbreviation I did not recognize.

I rubbed my gold wedding band with my left thumb, feeling the thin metal warm against my skin. “Mark, what is this eighty-seven dollars for?”

He did not look up from his apple, but his left thumb started to slide against his jean pocket. “Which one?”

“The monthly draft to SRS LLC,” I said, pointing to the printed line near the bottom of the page. “It has been going through every single month since we merged our accounts after the wedding.”

“It is probably just an old insurance premium,” he said, setting the knife down on the board. “Some small policy I set up years ago and forgot to cancel.”

“An insurance policy would have a full company name, not three letters,” I said. “And the bank would have a record of the policy number in the transaction details.”

“I will look into it when I have some free time,” he said.

He picked up the last apple wedge, chewed it slowly, and stood up to rinse his plate in the sink. The hot water ran into the porcelain bowl, steam rising against the window glass and obscuring the dark maple trees in the backyard.