It all started about four years ago. My wife and I were just recently married when she let Mike, a friend of a friend of ours live with us without asking me. After she left me seven months ago, I found out that she was cheating on me with both of them, as well as with people in her old neighborhood when she would go and visit her parents almost every month. To get her back for not consulting me with letting Mike stay there, I went behind her back and let the pregnant girlfriend of one of our other friends stay with us during one of my wife's trips to her parent's house. She had no where else to go, and the whole town including the police thought that she was an eighteen year old named Lexis. It wasn't until six months later, when the missing child flier went up at the local convenient store that anyone knew the truth. She was a fourteen year old run-away from a foster home named Laurie. We notified the police and they took her back to her foster parents. We found out later that she had a miscarriage. End of story, or so I thought.
About a month ago, there was a knock on the door. I answered it. It was Laurie, and now she was really eighteen. She was wearing a pair of blue sweat pants with a matching blue sweat shirt, a pair of pink and white tennis shoes, and a pair of big, dark sunglasses. Her long blonde hair was pulled down over as much of her face as possible, and I could see the dry tears on her face. She was carrying a small back pack, only big enough to hold a couple of changes of clothes. "Come on in, Lexis." I thought for a moment. "I'm sorry, mean Laurie." She smiled at me.
"That's okay, Eric." she replied. "After living for a year as Lexis, it took me a while to get used to people calling me Laurie." We went into the house, and as she sat on the sofa, I went into the kitchen to fix us a couple of glasses of ice tea. As I handed her a glass of iced tea, I jokingly said that she should remove her sunglasses before she ruined her eye sight. Hesitantly, she removed the sunglasses.
"Oh my God!" I gasped. Her right eye had a big bruise around it. I asked her what had happened to her face, and she said that her foster father beat her before kicking her out on the street, with nowhere to go and not a dime to her name. She told me that she came back here because it was the one place that she ever felt safe and secure at. I let her know that she could stay as long as she needed to.
After dinner, I picked up her back pack and led her to the guest room. She said she was going to take a quick shower, and then she had a gift for me. I told her the gift wasn't necessary, but she insisted. I went back into the living room to watch some TV, as she carried her back pack to the bath room. A half hour later, she returned to the living room, with a towel wrapped around her and the back pack in her hand. She pulled some money out of the back pack and handed it to me. "I figure I owe you about three thousand dollars for the six months I was here four years ago." she said. This is a thousand dollars, but I will get you the rest of it."
"Where did you get this money from?" I asked.
