I thought money made life easier.
I thought it also made people easier to understand.
I was wrong about both.
For most of my life, I had never needed to wonder whether I could afford something before buying it.
If my car needed replacing, I replaced it.
If something in my house stopped working, I paid someone to fix it.
I rarely looked at price tags, and I had never stood in a grocery store putting things back because I couldn't afford everything in my basket.
That was the world I knew.
It was comfortable, familiar, and so ordinary to me that I barely noticed it.
My parents had money.
I had built a successful business of my own.
By the time Skyla came into my life, I had reached the point where financial problems were things I heard about from other people rather than things I experienced myself.
I didn't think that made me better than anyone.
At least, I wouldn't have admitted to thinking that.
But looking back, I can see how little I understood about people who had to calculate every decision against the money in their bank accounts.
Skyla understood those things better than I ever would.
She was still in college when we started dating.
She had classes to attend, assignments to finish, and shifts to work whenever she could fit them around her studies.
Her life didn't leave much room for rest.
She worked evenings.
She worked weekends.
When she wasn't studying, she was earning money to keep herself in school.
Sometimes, when we spoke on the phone, I could hear the tiredness in her voice before she said anything about her day.
She never made a big performance out of being exhausted.
She would tell me she had a lot to do, ask how my day had gone, and then return to whatever assignment was waiting for her.
I could spend an afternoon dealing with business matters and call it a difficult day.
Skyla could spend an entire day moving between school and work, then stay awake studying because she couldn't afford to fall behind.
We used the same word for two very different experiences.
Busy.
I didn't understand that difference as well as I should have.
Her car was old.
It seemed to need attention whenever she could least afford it, and each repair was another expense she had to work into a budget that was already stretched thin.
She bought secondhand textbooks.
She planned her paychecks around tuition, rent, and food.
Sometimes she ate noodles for several meals because there wasn't enough room in her budget for anything more.
I knew these things.
She didn't hide them from me.
But she never used them to make me feel guilty, and she never turned them into a reason I should pay for her life.
That was one of the first things I admired about her.
It was also something I would later use against her in my own mind, even though she had done nothing wrong.
We had been together for nearly two years.
During that time, I had offered to help with her tuition more than once.
I could have paid it without changing anything about my life.
The amount that caused her weeks of worry would barely have registered in my accounts.
Whenever I brought it up, she refused.
She didn't shout.
She didn't accuse me of looking down on her.
She simply made it clear that she wanted to handle her responsibilities herself.
She wanted to know she could finish college through her own effort.
I respected that answer.
At least, I thought I did.
I told myself I admired her independence.
I told myself I loved the fact that she didn't expect me to solve every problem for her.
And I did love those things.
The trouble was that I also wanted certainty.
I wanted to know that if everything I owned disappeared, Skyla would still look at me the same way.
Instead of trusting what she had shown me for almost two years, I started looking for a guarantee that no person could honestly give me.
At first, the doubt came from outside our relationship.
My friends knew about Skyla.
They knew she was a student, that she worked constantly, and that I had considerably more money than she did.
They also knew about my business and my family.
Some of them thought our different circumstances were a problem waiting to happen.
They said it casually at first.
A comment here.
A question there.
They wondered whether Skyla understood how comfortable her life could become if she stayed with me.
They suggested that a woman in her position might have reasons for wanting the relationship to work that had nothing to do with love.
I didn't like hearing those things.
I defended her sometimes.
I reminded them that she had never asked me for money.
I pointed out that she had refused the very help they seemed to think she was after.
Those should have been the end of the discussion.
But I kept listening.
That was my mistake.
I let their suspicions follow me home, where I began examining ordinary moments as though they might contain hidden meanings.
When Skyla talked about a difficult week at school, I wondered whether she was hoping I would offer financial help.
When she declined something expensive, I wondered whether she was trying to prove a point.
When she accepted something small from me, I questioned whether I was seeing a sign of dependence where there was none.
Every answer seemed to create another question.
I had enough evidence to trust her.
I simply wasn't satisfied with evidence anymore.
I wanted a test.
I wanted to arrange a situation in which I could watch her make a choice and then tell myself I finally knew the truth.
The more I thought about it, the more reasonable that idea seemed.
That is difficult to admit now.
I wasn't protecting myself from something Skyla had done.
I was trying to protect myself from a fear I couldn't control.
And rather than face that fear honestly, I decided to make her prove something she had never promised to prove.
I wanted to see what she would do if being with me became difficult.
I wanted to see what would happen if I couldn't give her the comfortable life people assumed she might want.
I told myself I needed to know.
I didn't stop to ask why someone who claimed to love another person would deliberately create a crisis just to measure that love.
I didn't stop to consider what such a test might do to her.
I was too busy imagining the answer I would receive.
And I was already preparing myself to believe the worst.
Click here to continue reading: PART 2: My Parents’ Warnings Followed Me Home Until I Mistook My Own Fear for Proof That Something Was Wrong
I Had Everything Money Could Buy, Yet I Was Afraid the One Person I Loved Might Only Want What I Owned
Part 1 of 8
