Chapter 15 Building It Together
Nathan and I have been together for five months when we have the money conversation.
It happens on a Sunday afternoon at his apartment.
Ronnie is out somewhere. Nathan and I are on the couch with coffee and the remains of a late breakfast on the kitchen counter and the kind of lazy, comfortable quiet that only happens between two people who have stopped feeling the need to perform around each other.
I'm reading. Nathan is reading. Our feet are touching under the blanket. The sunlight is coming through the window and the room is warm and nobody has spoken in about fifteen minutes and it's perfect.
Then Nathan puts his book down.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
"Sure."
"Have you thought about what you want next? Not relationship-wise. I mean practically. Your apartment. Your job. Where you want to be in a year."
I put my book down too. This is the kind of question Nathan asks when he's been thinking about something for a while and has waited for the right moment to bring it up.
"I've thought about it," I say. "My lease on Birch Street runs for another seven months. After that I'm not sure. I like the apartment but it's small and Dorothy keeps hinting that her niece might want the unit eventually."
"What about the salon?"
"The salon is good. My client list is growing. Cheryl has been talking about retiring in a couple of years and she's been training me on the business side. Ordering product, managing inventory, scheduling. She said if I want it the salon could be mine eventually."
"That's a big opportunity."
"It is. But it requires money I don't have."
Nathan nods. He picks up his coffee and takes a drink.
"I've been thinking about something," he says. "And I want to run it by you before it becomes a plan."
"Okay."
"I qualify for a VA loan. Zero down payment. Favorable interest rates. I've been eligible since I left the Army but I haven't used it because I wasn't ready. I didn't have a reason to buy a house when I was living with Ronnie and paying half the rent and putting money away."
I look at him. I can see where this is going but I wait for him to say it because Nathan deserves to say things at his own pace.
"I have a reason now," he says. "You're the reason. I want to build something with you, Lara. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But I want you to know that when you're ready I'm ready. And I have a way to make it happen that doesn't require either of us to drain our savings."
My chest feels tight in a way that isn't unpleasant.
I think about Blake and the house fund. I think about the four hundred dollars a month I put in faithfully while Blake spent his portion on dinners and motel rooms. I think about the spreadsheets and the bank statements and the painful math of discovering that the future I was saving for was being dismantled by the person I was building it with.
"Nathan, I need to tell you something about why the house conversation is hard for me."
"You don't have to."
"I want to. Because if we're going to do this then you need to understand what happened the last time I tried to build a house with someone."
I tell him. Not the affair parts. He knows those.
I tell him the financial parts. The shared savings account.
The monthly contributions. Blake's shortfalls.
The gradual discovery that the money I was putting away for our future was being redirected to fund his affair.
I tell him about the spreadsheets I made at Raina's kitchen table showing the disparity between our deposits.
I tell him about the careful, incremental transfers I made to rescue my contributions before I left.
Nathan listens. He doesn't interrupt.
"So when you bring up buying a house," I say, "the first thing my brain does is remember the last time someone talked to me about buying a house.
It remembers the excitement and the planning and the joint account and then it remembers finding out that the whole thing was built on sand.
I'm not saying no. I'm saying that I need this to be done differently. "
"How differently?"
"Transparently. I want to see the numbers.
All of them. Your savings. Your debt. Your credit score.
Everything. Not because I don't trust you but because I can't go through the experience of discovering financial lies again.
If we're doing this then I need it to be completely open from the beginning. "
"I can do that right now."
He gets up from the couch. He walks to his room and comes back thirty seconds later with a laptop and a manila folder that looks like it's been sitting on his desk ready for this conversation. He sits down next to me and opens the laptop and pulls up his bank account.
"This is my checking," he says, turning the screen toward me. A normal checking account with regular deposits and routine expenses. Then he clicks to another tab. "And this is my savings."
The number is higher than I expected. Significantly higher. I blink and look again to make sure I'm reading the decimal point correctly.
"Nathan."
"Army pay isn't great but the cost of living on base is low.
Especially when you're single and you don't go out much and your idea of entertainment is a book from the base library.
I saved most of what I earned for four years.
Then I got the logistics job and kept saving because Ronnie's rent is cheap and I don't spend much.
I don't gamble. I don't buy expensive things.
My truck is ten years old. My most expensive hobby is buying books and most of those I get used. "
He opens the manila folder. Inside is his credit report, printed and highlighted with a yellow marker.
His credit score is in the excellent range.
His only debt is a small balance on a credit card that he pays off monthly for the sake of credit history.
No car payment because his truck is owned outright.
No student loans because the Army covered his degree through the GI Bill.
There's also a printout of his VA loan eligibility certificate, which means he requested it specifically for this conversation. He planned this. He gathered every document I might want to see and he had them organized in a folder on his desk waiting for the day I was ready to look at them.
I look at the documents. I look at the numbers. I look at Nathan, who is sitting next to me with his entire financial life laid out on a coffee table because I said I needed transparency and he responded by providing it within sixty seconds.
"This is the most unromantic thing anyone has ever done for me," I say. "And it's the most meaningful."
"I'm an open book, Lara. I always have been.
You can look at anything. My phone. My email.
My bank account. My browser history, though I'll warn you it's mostly military history articles and book reviews.
I don't have secrets. I've never had secrets.
Secrets take energy and I'd rather spend that energy on other things. "
"I know you don't have secrets. That's not why I asked. I asked because I needed to see it. I needed the proof. Not because of you. Because of what happened before you."
He nods. He understands. Nathan understands things without needing them explained twice because Nathan pays attention the first time.
"Now you," he says. "Fair is fair."
I pull up my own banking information on my phone.
My savings account, which has been rebuilding steadily since I reclaimed my contributions from the joint account with Blake.
My checking, which shows my salon deposits and my rent and my modest living expenses.
My credit report, which I access through the same online service Nathan used.
I show him everything. I don't hide the smaller numbers or apologize for them.
My savings are less than his because I make less money, because I lost months of contributions to Blake's spending, and because I spent money furnishing a new apartment from scratch.
But my credit is good. My debts are minimal.
I have no outstanding loans. I pay my bills on time.
I've been saving three hundred dollars a month since moving to Birch Street, which is less than the four hundred I used to put into the house fund with Blake but it's honest money going to an honest purpose and that makes it worth more.
"We're in good shape," Nathan says, looking at the combined picture. "Between my VA loan eligibility and our combined savings we could afford a house in Pinehurst. Nothing huge. But something solid."
"A real house."
"A real house. With a kitchen you can cook in and a porch you can sit on and a yard where you could plant things if you wanted to."
"I don't know anything about planting things."
"Dorothy could teach you. She'd probably love that. She's been trying to get someone interested in gardening since her husband died."
"Did you just use my landlord's loneliness to sell me on a garden?"
"I used a available resource to enhance the proposal."
I laugh. He smiles. We sit on his couch with our financial documents spread out between us and we talk about what a house could look like.
Not the specific house. We're not there yet.
But the idea of a house. The concept. What it would mean to both of us.
For Nathan it would be the first permanent home he's had since leaving his mother's house at eighteen.
Four years in the Army and three years in apartments and he's never owned a wall or a piece of land.
For me it would be proof that the dream I lost when Blake destroyed our savings account was never actually dead.
It was just waiting for the right person to build it with.