Something I didn’t have a name for.
I stared at the number on my screen until it stopped making sense. Until it was just digits and symbols that represented something I couldn’t quite process. Then I looked back at Amai’s messages.
Check your account.
Rest. We try again in six weeks.
Simple. Direct. No explanation. No apology. Just action.
Just him keeping his word in the only way that mattered.
My hands were still shaking when I typed out a response.
You didn’t have to do this.
I hit send before I could second-guess it. Watched the message turn from gray to blue, delivered and read almost immediately.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Then his response came through.
Yes, I did.
I read it three times.
Four.
Five.
Yes, I did.
NotI wanted to. Notyou deserve it. Just a simple statement of fact. Like there had never been any other option. Like paying me fifty thousand dollars for a failed transfer was the most logical thing in the world.
I pressed my phone against my chest and closed my eyes, trying to steady my breathing. Trying to understand what this meant. Whathemeant.
Because this wasn’t just about money.
This was about trust. About commitment. About a man who’d stayed on the phone with me for forty-five minutes in the middle of the night and then woke up at dawn to make sure I knew he wasn’t walking away.
I opened my eyes and looked at my phone again.
Typed slowly, carefully.
Thank you.
His response came back almost immediately.
Six weeks. Then we try again.
I nodded even though he couldn’t see me.
Six weeks.
I could do six weeks.
I’d already survived worse.
Three days after the money hit my account, I sat at Mama’s kitchen table with a legal pad and a calculator. The $50,000 felt surreal—more money than I’d ever had at one time in my life. But I’d learned the hard way that money disappeared fast if you didn’t have a plan. I’d barely touched the other 50K Amai gave me.
