Chapter 1

1.

My husband, Tom, lives in a fantasy bubble. He genuinely believes he’s just one killer investment away from becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg.

He brings home four thousand dollars a month after taxes from his accounting firm, which barely covers the mortgage and our bills. Yet, he had the audacity to throw our entire twenty-thousand-dollar emergency fund into a crypto project called "MetaGold."

I saw the glaring transaction on our joint account that night.

$20,000.00

Recipient: MetaGold Capital LLC

Description: "Initial Investment - The Gateway to Financial Freedom"

My hands started to shake. That was our entire safety net―money I had scrimped and saved, penny by penny, for a job loss, a medical emergency, or TJ's college fund.

Tom walked out of his study, wearing that smug grin that makes my stomach turn, like he’d just won a Nobel Prize.

“What’s up, honey?”

“There’s a twenty-thousand-dollar transfer… Tom, did you drain our emergency fund?”

Tom snatched my phone. “I sure did.”

He said it so casually. “It’s not spending, Sarah. It’s an investment. MetaGold is the next Bitcoin. My cousin Mike already made half a million from it. Now is the perfect time to get in―in another month, the buy-in will be a hundred grand minimum.”

“You know what Mike said? This project is backed by a former Goldman Sachs VP and supported by blockchain technology. The returns could hit 300%. We put in twenty grand, and in a year, it’ll be eighty!”