But nobody had ever asked me like she asked it. Like she actually wanted to know the answer.
“Because my husband and my sister stole money using my name,” I said. “And then they convinced everyone I was the one who did it.”
Opal didn’t react. She just buttered a roll.
“Tell me,” she said.
So I told her.
I told her how I’d started Buckeye Medical Supply eleven years ago, when I was twenty-five, with fourteen thousand dollars I’d saved from waitressing and a small business loan my father co-signed.
How I rented that tiny storefront between the nail salon and the tax office. How I spent every Sunday for three years driving around central Ohio in my old Honda, with a trunk full of brochures, knocking on the doors of private clinics, trying to get them to buy from me instead of the big national companies.
