Pam was always the one who kept track of their finances. Even before they were engaged, she was the one checking in with Roy about whether he’d remembered to actually deposit his paycheck from the garage where he worked part-time, reminding him that because the owner resolutely insisted on not paying him under the table he actually had to file taxes at the end of the year (well, April) to get a refund on what the government had withheld, gently prodding about whether he’d remembered to do what all those ads recommended and compare and save on his car insurance when the time rolled around.

Once they got engaged and moved in with each other, these responsibilities rapidly switched from things she reminded him about to things she did. In retrospect she probably (definitely, absolutely) shouldn’t have combined their finances as much as she did, but it was so much easier to have a joint account from which she could make sure their rent was paid without nagging Roy for his half, to do both their taxes and have him sign off on his side (since “married, filing jointly” required rather a significant movement towards that first word from the first-appreciated and then rapidly-frustrating “engaged”), to make sure the recurring bills were on a credit card and the credit card itself was set to pay itself (or at least enough of itself each month to avoid too many extra charges) each month as well from that same joint account.

Roy would have denied it if you had asked him outright about it. He was always a bit conservative about things like that—not conservative in the way that you wanted to go back to the days when women couldn’t get accounts without their husband’s or father’s say-so, or where everything, even an obituary, would refer to “Mrs. Roy Anderson” without even acknowledging that the woman had a name of her own, but conservative like “a man takes care of his own shit” and “of course I’m in charge of the money, I make it don’t I?” (even though she’d been working as long as he had)—and so if someone had come up and stated that Pam was the one who knew where their money was or how much of it they had, he’d have laughed and said something that would have made her annoyed in the moment but which she’d have gotten over eventually with no help from him.

But she was the one who kept track, no matter what Roy thought. She was the one who got the emails that told her when there were big expenses on their joint credit cards, or when the rent was due, or when someone made a deposit or a withdrawal from their accounts. And so she was the one who got the email about the bank draft.

The bank draft that corresponded to the same amount that the guy selling the Mustang had asked for; the one that made for a certified check, one that couldn’t bounce and therefore didn’t require that guy to trust Roy to be good for the money; the one that didn’t technically directly say that Roy had spent the money they’d discussed (she’d discussed, at length) saving for their wedding on a new-to-him, old-to-the-world car, but certainly would have been accepted as evidence of such in any court of law in the world. That bank draft.

At first she didn’t really realize what she was looking at, because it was such a big number that she assumed for a moment that somehow the bank had decided to just send her an email telling her how much money was in her account. But she was aware, in the back of her mind, that banks didn’t actually do that—that if someone who claimed to be a bank was doing something that looked like that, it was almost certainly a scam to get you to click on a link, and so this had to be something else. Specifically, it had to be a withdrawal, the issuing of a check that moved the money from their account into a financial instrument that could be given to someone else.

Again, in retrospect, this would have made for a good moment for a sharp break. A fight. A slap. At least an argument.

But Pam still thought of being reasonable as one of her core features, and so she didn’t yell and she didn’t snap. She asked Roy that evening if anything interesting had happened, if he had anything to tell her, and he didn’t read the room sufficiently to notice that she wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the question, and the rest of the dinner was full of him describing to her how amazing it had been to have the title of the Mustang passed into his hands, and how wonderful it had been to drive—all the way to the garage he used to work at, where he’d had to leave it with his old boss who was going to fix “a couple of things in the engine” for just the cost of parts as a personal favor.

And Pam couldn’t even deny that getting Ricky to fix the car for cheap was a good idea, the kind of good idea that Roy wouldn’t normally have come up with. Usually he’d have insisted he could do it himself, and it would have ended up costing twice the cost of a more competent mechanic working on it through all the issues he’d have caused while trying to fix what was originally wrong (ignoring labor—it was still worth it to let Roy work on their cars most of the time because labor was so expensive, which was part of why she had never put her foot down about it before). So she let that small piece of good news take over for the bad, and she said it sounded like a good idea, and they ate the spaghetti and meatballs she’d made while Roy was signing over their worldly goods to a guy with a Mustang and life went on as normal.