My uncle Ned took my hand. “Thank you for coming, Silas,” he said.

I was fighting hard to hold back my tears. Ned was my last living relative, and he was dying. Minutes before, his physician had delivered the news to me in the small lobby at the end of the Intensive Care Unit.

Uncle Ned and I had always been close. He was my mother’s brother, and like a second father to me. Two years before, as I had watched my mother’s coffin being lowered into her grave, Ned had put his arm around me and said, “She is in a better place, son.”

Now it was just Ned and me, and he knew it was his turn. Since he had been taken sick, I had come to the hospital every day. He thought I was coming for his sake, but I realized now I was coming for my own. Today he had the doctor call and say that I needed to go early, as it was urgent that I speak to him.

“I was coming anyway. I’ll just come a bit early,” I said.

When I arrived, Ned said, “I need to talk to you about the egg money,” in a voice that was getting weaker.

The egg money was kind of a family legend. It began with my great-grandfather, Silas, my namesake, whose father had been a lawyer. But Silas wanted to be a farmer. His father was opposed, but young Silas had been keeping chickens behind the well-to-do family’s house. This was a bit of an embarrassment to the affluent family. Silas sold the eggs and saved the money. When Silas was twenty, his father put his foot down and said that he’d had enough of the chickens. If Silas refused to enter what his father considered a suitable profession, then he would be cut off from the family’s wealth.

What his father did not know was that Silas had made considerable money from the sale of eggs. Silas left home and set himself up on a farm. He prospered greatly in this endeavor, to the point that he reconciled with his family.

After going out on his own, Silas always set aside the egg money in a special fund. He eventually gave this money to my grandfather as a kind of trust for future generations of the family. My grandfather had two children; my mother, Sonia, and my uncle Ned, to whom he entrusted the egg money, as it was called. Anytime there was a financial problem in the family, my mother and Uncle Ned would say, let’s tap the egg money, and then they would laugh hysterically.

Perhaps it was because of the laughter that I saw the egg money as a kind of joke. Ned was a lawyer like his grandfather, Silas’s father. Still, Ned always lived very frugally, in a small house with very modest needs. He had never married, often saying that he would marry when he found a woman as good as his mother or his sister, but I guess he never did.

“Uncle,” I said, “If there is nothing in the egg fund, I do not care. I am here for you, not money.”

“I know that, and that is why I called you. Next month, you will marry Nancy, and ... well, as good as she seems and as pretty as she is, there is something there I just cannot trust. It is said that you do not know your spouse until you have been married for a long time,” Ned said, and then paused before continuing.

“In my desk at home, you will find my will and all the information on the Silas Stevenson family trust. Please do not tell your wife about it until you are completely sure of her and have been married for at least five years. Promise me this, and I will go to my eternal rest in peace.”

What could I do? I made my uncle the promise he sought. It was, I believed, a small, unimportant matter. I was to be proved very wrong.

I stayed another hour with my uncle. During that time, he seemed to go to sleep, but then monitors beeped and buzzed. My uncle Ned was gone to join my mother and his. Three days later, I buried my uncle in the family plot next to my mom and dad. Their parents were there, as was the entire family in the little cemetery outside of Massena. Nancy, my fiancée, did not make the funeral. She had final exams. Nancy was then a fourth-year medical student.

Nancy and I had been together for about two years. She and Uncle Ned had never clicked. Nancy can be a bit off-putting. She is a very driven person. From high school on, she had been focused on becoming a doctor. She made every sacrifice called for. It left her a bit socially stunted.

She is a pretty woman. Some might even say beautiful, at five foot six with shoulder-length, blond hair. She had the figure of a cheerleader but the personality of a computer geek. She was not the best at math, which is how we met. In college I was a tutor for those challenged by calculus. Nancy was assigned to me. She needed good grades to get into med school, and that meant not just passing calculus, but doing very well.

Somehow, we just seemed to connect. My ambition was to teach. We were both dedicated to helping others. Neither of us had much relationship experience. We started what I would call study dating. We would get together to study and end up at the coffee shop. Gradually, we began necking on the way home.

On the night I got the news of my mother’s death, I was with Nancy. The following day, I asked her to marry me. But we put off the nuptials until I graduated and found a teaching job.

A week after Ned’s funeral, I opened the drawer to my uncle’s desk and discovered he had left me a great burden. There, neatly laid out, were his last testament and the records of a trust to which I was the sole beneficiary. The monthly statements of banks and brokers said it all. The Stevenson Family Trust contained almost seven million dollars.

Nancy and I had been living together for several years while she completed school. I obtained my teaching certificate, and the wedding was planned for the following month. I would be supporting us on my teacher’s salary while she completed her degree. She still had a long road ahead, as she wished to become a surgeon. The money I had inherited would make life easier, but I had promised to keep it a secret. I also saw the egg money as a kind of personal obligation, something to be handed down to our children.

I didn’t tell Nancy about the trust fund and instead took the money to an investment firm in Manhattan. If we needed something, I would dip into the funds, always making it seem like I had borrowed the money and was struggling to pay it back—in a way, that was true. I intended to repay the trust as best I could.

Her parents threw us a fine wedding, but I refused their offer to pay for a honeymoon. I took us to an expensive Caribbean resort, telling Nancy that Uncle Ned had left me a bequest for our honeymoon—and that was the truth.

Those first few years of our marriage, I saw very little of Nancy. It seemed as if she was constantly studying, but when we were together, life was good. Very good. My career eventually kept me very busy. I was a public school teacher in a prestigious district where I taught second grade. With my math background, I could have taught high school, and even gone on for an advanced degree and become a college professor. However, my aspirations were to change my students’ lives for the better. My heart told me that the best place to do that was teaching young children.

Nancy didn’t understand the nature of my vocation, but at first, she accepted it. As I said, we were very happy with her as a medical student and me teaching young children. I was looking forward to someday having children of our own.

Eventually, Nancy graduated and interned at the local medical center. I went from seeing her too little to seeing her almost not at all. However, I knew she was working toward a goal. I believed that when her internship was over, we would be truly together. However, soon she was embarked on a residency. Before I knew it, we had been married five years.

The time had come to tell Nancy about the egg money, but something held me back. I knew I should tell her, but something held me silent. Finally, I admitted to myself that I didn’t trust my wife. She was ambitious, and too conscious of her social position. I told myself that in time, she would mature, and then I could disclose the egg money.

Nancy completed her residency and began her career as a surgeon. I thought we would see each other more, but we didn’t. However, Nancy’s income vastly increased, and soon she was talking about buying a house. I saw this as a good sign that we would be planning a family.

Nancy insisted on buying an expensive house in a fashionable neighborhood that she felt matched her new, inflated status.

“I’m a surgeon,” she told me, “and this is a successful doctor’s house.”

The house was the classic McMansion, using too much of a small lot and having an interior design that created a lot of useless space. It had a freestanding, three-car garage that Nancy soon filled with an expensive luxury car and a four-wheel-drive, all-terrain vehicle. Our little Subaru that I drove was squeezed into the third space.

My suggestion that it was now time to consider starting a family was brushed aside.

“We just now have our freedom. Children would tie us down. It’s time to enjoy our success,” she argued.

However, we didn’t enjoy our freedom; or at least, I didn’t. I spent many lonely nights and weekends in a large, empty house. We lived in a picture-postcard neighborhood where the houses were close but the people were distant. Allegedly, Nancy was off working both nights and weekends, but I began to suspect that it wasn’t all work.

Out of boredom, I began volunteering weekends at the local daycare and spending my nights in chat rooms on the Internet. It was this last activity that led to a strange development. I generally frequented education-orientated groups where we discussed the current trends in education. One evening, a newbie showed up with a peculiar and highly specific question.

“This is Hermes,” he wrote. “Does anyone know about an educational program called Doctrina? I’d be interested in your thoughts.”

The board I was on that night was primarily school administrators. They had heard of the educational software he was mentioning. It was a complicated package of computer-assisted programs for elementary school children that was getting a lot of hype just then in the press. Most of the administrators on the board that night were highly enthusiastic. However, my school just happened to be a test site, and I knew the software was useless.

“Technology,” I commented, “is all very well. But Doctrina would require a large investment in hardware for nearly all schools. Even the best-funded schools have only a computer or two per classroom in the lower grades. Using this software would require a large investment for a modest gain. That rules out public schools, and all but a few elite private schools. However, if you are spending a small fortune sending your child to private school, do you want your child taught by a machine?”

“What about homeschooling?” Hermes queried.

I had thoughts on that, and soon, he suggested that we have a private chat. We discussed Doctrina’s chances of success in the educational field for the next four hours. It was after two in the morning when we signed off. However, my wife still wasn’t home. She came in around three and stumbled into our bedroom. I pretended to be asleep. She had clearly been drinking and, therefore, had not been working. She threw her clothes into the hamper and headed to the master bath off the bedroom.

Before I left for work the following day, I checked the hamper. Nancy was still asleep. Allegedly, she worked the four to midnight shift, but I had my doubts. The clothes in the hamper were not what you wear to work, particularly the fancy underwear that was stained with evidence of sex. Whatever faith I had in my wife was lost.

For the next two weeks, I went around in a kind of fog, wondering what had become of my life and trying to determine a course ahead. What had gone wrong? Was it something I did or didn’t do? Was it one man or many? Should I confront her? Should we try counseling?

There were so many questions but no easy answers. Little Jeffrey Anderson snapped me out of it. He was a bright young boy, but he was struggling. He had definite reading problems and was having trouble with pronunciation. I suspected a learning disability. We didn’t have the facilities to adequately test him at our school. We tested, but it was strictly routine. I knew his parents had resources. I informed them of what I suspected at the parent-teacher meeting and recommended several good sources to assist them. Sure enough, Jeffrey had a problem and needed extra help to overcome it. Helping Jeffrey would take my mind off my marital issues.

At the end of the evaluation and intervention meeting, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson thanked me. Mrs. Anderson hugged me and said, “You’re a wonderful man. Your wife is a very fortunate woman, although she doesn’t seem to know it.”

Mrs. Anderson was a nursing supervisor at my wife’s hospital, and her husband was a prominent attorney. Jack Anderson then shook my hand and said, “If there is ever anything you need, Silas, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

I left feeling like a giant. I was at the top of my profession. That’s when I got a cryptic email from Hermes telling me to log on to the discussion board late that evening for a private chat. My next email was from my wife telling me she would be late again that night. I logged on to the message board at about 11:00 p.m. Hermes was there waiting for me.

“Hey, Teach,” he began, “I sure owe you. That Doctrina deal tanked. You saved me a bundle.”

“I’m glad, but is that what you do? Invest?”

“Yeah, I started as a day trader with some family money, but I nearly lost it all. However, I met this fellow who runs a fund that invests in startups. I’ve been investing with him for about three years now. He doesn’t always hit, but when he does, it’s a good payday. He was pushing this Doctrina until I clued him in. He’s grateful for the aid you gave us.”

“Well, glad to help.”

“Look, my friend and I discussed it, and well, we have a deal that’s a real long shot. If you’re interested, I can give you a piece of my buy-in. The minimum buy-in is five hundred thousand. I’ll let you have a share of my piece, any amount you want, up to five thousand,” he said.

“Well, I guess I could invest part of the egg money,” I typed.

“Ha-ha, that’s good, egg money!”

I didn’t know this guy, other than talking over a message board, but something was pushing me that night. I was on a high from my success with Jeffrey Anderson and at a low because I could sense that Mrs. Anderson knew what my wife was up to behind my back.

“You know, friend,” I wrote, “I’ll come in, but I want a full share.”

“Five hundred thousand! Seriously? You’re a teacher?”

“Like I said, I have egg money.”

“Eggs! Who knew?”

“But what’s this company called?”

“The company’s called Odeo, but we’re investing in the spin-off; they’re calling it Twitter. Yeah, I know, silly name.”

It was a very silly name, but I guess you know what happened. I was in without any idea what I was into. If Hermes had explained what it was, I certainly would have passed. It was, in my view, a silly idea to go with the silly name. It was to be the first of several silly ideas. Sometimes they tanked, but when they hit, the returns were great.

Five years after buying into Twitter, I was watching my wife from across a ballroom. Things between Nancy and I had gone downhill. We were at a fundraiser and holiday party for the hospital. Everyone was in formal dress except for the teacher. I was in my best blue suit, and I could feel my wife’s embarrassment. For her part, she was hanging on the arm of a young surgeon, her latest lover. Soon the dancing would begin, and she would be in his arms dancing too close to be respectable.

I should have cared, but divorce was definitely in the cards. The trouble was that I was far too wealthy at the moment. I was wealthier than any man had a right to be. I had concealed this wealth, but I could not see how it would not come out in a divorce and disrupt my life. It was a strange set of circumstances that had brought me to this place in my life. I had been secretly using the egg money to do good, but exercising great care to avoid disclosing my possession of that money. However, fate was not yet through with the egg money, or me.

“Mr. Stevenson,” a woman said, taking hold of my arm.

I turned from watching my wife to find Mrs. Anderson at my side.

“Oh, hello, Mary,” I said. “I should have known you would be here. Congratulations on being named head of nursing.”

“Thank you, and if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to introduce you to several people.”

She led me to a small group.

“You know my husband, Jack, and this is Leslie Dumont, our hospital president. Her husband, Arthur, and Donna—”

“Miller,” I said, interrupting her. “We’re old acquaintances.”

Mary turned to Donna. “Oh, you know Mr. Stevenson?”

“Yes,” Donna said. “Silas is a volunteer at the daycare I use. I’m afraid I’ve imposed on him several times by being late for my pickup.”

Donna was a short woman with a round figure. Not exactly fat, but with wide hips and voluminous breasts. Like the old drawings of sexy wood nymphs, I thought the first time I saw her. I was entranced by her silky, black hair cut short to frame her beautiful, round face.

She had two children enrolled in the daycare center where I volunteered. She was a registered nurse at the hospital, working weekends to avoid night shifts. She had little help at home, since her husband had died two years prior. The weekend daycare is very limited and hard to maintain due to reduced demand and significant expense. Our daycare ran seven days a week due to a grant from a mysterious foundation with an odd name: “The Ovum Foundation.”