Business, Betrayal, and Forgiveness

A neighbor of mine moved away from her old town to be with her husband again. I'll call them Carl and Sherril so nobody can be identified. They had separated years before and lived in different places, crossing paths only at family events and the occasional big occasion. After a long stretch apart, the two of them decided to try again, and part of that fresh start was a venture they could run together: a grocery store. Sherril handled the floor. She talked with customers, kept the shelves and the day-to-day moving, while Carl sat with the books. For a while it ran smoothly, mostly because they had patched the trust between them back together.

Everything went into a single account. Whatever the store earned got deposited there, and the plan they'd agreed on was simple: pay the bills, take a modest profit, then start buying real estate. On paper the shop was doing fine. Yet certain popular items kept vanishing from the shelves and never got reordered, supposedly for lack of cash. That gap between how well things seemed to go and how tight the money felt eventually nagged at Sherril enough that she walked into the bank to ask how the account actually looked.

The teller told her something she wasn't ready for. The deposits she assumed had been piling up weren't there. No record of them. Carl, it turned out, had not been honoring any part of their arrangement. The more she dug, the worse it got. He had been quietly funneling the money elsewhere, and when the cover came off, he turned violent. He hadn't deposited a dime of the store's earnings. He had also taken out loans she knew nothing about, sold the family car along with most of what they owned together, and burned through all of it on trips out of town that he never explained. In time he started hitting her, demanding more money from the business, disappearing for a weekend, then coming back with his hand out again.

The strain wrecked her. Her words came out tangled; she couldn't finish a thought cleanly. Headaches settled in for days at a stretch, and nothing she took touched them for long. The man she'd once trusted with both her marriage and her livelihood grew louder and crueler, until she found herself on the phone with the police reporting what he was doing. She was stunned by all of it, and heartbroken. For a long time afterward she leaned on a good psychotherapist to get her mind steady again.

And she did get steady. Once she was out of the relationship, something in her switched back on. She opened a new store. People had always liked Sherril, so her old customers followed her over and kept coming back, and that steady base pushed the new place forward. This time nobody balanced the books but her. She ran the money and the operations herself, and she turned a real profit. She saved, she raised her kids, and after a few years she bought property of her own instead of handing rent to someone else. The business kept growing on that land, with more ventures taking shape, while Carl's shop sank.

The contrast wasn't subtle. Sherril watched her finances carefully and stayed close to the people who bought from her. Carl put none of his income back into anything and spent his energy badgering her customers to defect to his store. That pitch, unsurprisingly, went nowhere.

Carl did eventually apologize. Sherril forgave him. She was not, however, about to let him near her operations again, and she didn't. What she did do was help him set up a business of his own, one he ran independently, which says a good deal about her. Looking back on all of it, she's said that forgiveness is something you do for yourself. Clinging to bitterness and anger wears down the body and the mind, so the better move is to take what the hard years taught you and keep going, rather than carry the old pain and refuse to live forward from it.

-Anonymous Contributor