All In: A Wife’s Comeback

My husband Justin Lansing and I met when we were both bussing tables. Neither one of us was afraid of work. We moved to Cratertown and started a breakfast cart. Five years on, we had cleared thirty thousand dollars and bought a used car.

Driving back to the village for the holidays felt like a homecoming victory lap.

Until the morning Justin came in and dropped to his knees on the kitchen floor.

"Babe, I lost everything. I lost the car too."

I had just gotten out of bed. The words bounced off me. It took me ten seconds to register what he had said.

"Wait... what?"

He said it again. The blood drained from my face.

"Tell me you're joking."

His phone buzzed. A voice memo from a contact saved as Uncle Buck:

"Justin, the car only books at five thousand. You're still two thousand short. Come pay it off, or we're coming to the house."

I yanked the phone out of his hand. The chat history with Uncle Buck stared back at me. The room tilted.

"Babe, I screwed up. I don't know what came over me. I won two thousand at the start. Then it just kept going the wrong way until everything was gone.

"Hit me. I deserve it."

He grabbed my hand and tried to swing it at his own face. I pulled it back.

Justin was not a gambler. He would play a casual hand or two with the guys he ran the cart with. None of those games went past lunch money.

You don't lose thirty thousand dollars in a single night without help.

He had been set up.

"Get up." I dragged him to his feet. "Idiot. They set you up."

"Tell me, who knew we cleared thirty thousand this year? Who did you tell?"

Justin flinched.

"Yesterday... at lunch. Uncle Buck came over for a drink. I was a little out of it. I might have said something about thirty grand from the breakfast cart.

"Uncle Buck wouldn't, would he?"

That uncle, I knew exactly who he was. Never held a proper job. Drank, smoked, chased women, gambled, his whole life. The older he got, the more he just stayed at the card table.

When young men came back from working in the city, he was always the first to gather them for drinks. Every year.

The games were always held in his old shed. The players changed, but the people watching never did.

I had passed by that place before. Every time, I would see him inside, flushed and excited, completely absorbed in the game. I never thought much of it.

But now...

He never worked, yet he never lacked money. Always smoking expensive cigarettes. Always drinking expensive liquor.

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became.

He was running a setup.

I patted Justin on the shoulder and took out the red envelope with our daughter's New Year money.

"Three hundred dollars. Take this first. I'll go with you. Let me handle it."

Justin panicked.

"Babe, don't go. We've got nothing left. We don't even have money for gas."

"Gas money doesn't matter. I'll show you how we get everything back. You go first. Use this money to stall them."

He still did not move. I smacked the back of his head.

"Go! That's our hard-earned money. You really going to let them take it?"

He snapped out of it, nodded quickly, grabbed the money, and rushed out.

I immediately placed an order for a few essential items.

If this was a setup, I was going to break it and take back every cent we earned.

As for that uncle, we only came back once a year. Lately, we had been working even harder for our child's education.

Neither side of the family had pensions. We were trying to build something while we still could.

And now, the moment we came back, someone set us up.

This time, I was not letting it go.