When Love Comes With a Price Tag

Synopsis

I made 1.6 million dollars a year, and every year I sent 1.5 million to my parents. My husband never said a word about it. But when my father suddenly had a brain hemorrhage at 63, I asked him to get the money for the surgery upfront. He tossed the bank card in front of me and said, "Take a look yourself. See how much is left." My name was Nina Carter, and I was 37 years old. I was a Senior Director of Engineering at one of internet companies in the country, and with my salary and stock options, I took home 1.6 million dollars a year. In the tech world, there weren't many women who had made it this far. But what got my colleagues talking wasn't my job title but how devoted I was to my parents. Every year, I transferred 1.5 million dollars to my parents. "Nina, you're the most devoted person I've ever met," Emily Clark, a female programmer in my team, had said more than once. "My parents worked so hard to raise me. Now that I can, it's only right that I give back to them," I always replied. My husband, Henry Carter, was an orthopedic surgeon at a hospital, earning 280 thousand dollars a year. We had been married for eight years and had a six-year-old son named Lucas Carter. To outsiders, we were the picture-perfect educated, high-earning family. Henry never questioned how much I sent to my parents. Every time I finished transferring the money, he'd just look up at me for a second, then go right back to his medical journals. I always saw that as his trust in me until that phone call came.