Till debt do us part | members only

The financial dominoes continued to fall. In the summer of 2019, she received a notice that the state was garnishing her wages. “I called [David] and asked him about it. He said, ‘It must be

a mistake.’ ” In an empty hallway in her office, she huddled in a corner and sobbed. After Minnesota’s department of revenue confirmed she owed unpaid taxes, Mary, suspecting more bad news,

called the IRS. A customer service agent told her that she and David owed $40,000 in back taxes. “How is this possible?” she asked. “We don’t make that much money.” “Honey,” the rep

answered, “someone is lying to you.” David, it turned out, had cashed in his retirement account and an old one of hers, worth $24,000. He had failed to report some of his income. And he’d

hidden years of IRS correspondence demanding payment and penalties. Where was the money going? “We got into a situation where we were spending more than we had on both sides,” David says.

“To maintain it, and not draw attention, I made some unwise choices.” As for the timeline of events that Mary recalls, he says, “I have nothing that I’ll dispute. It’s mostly true.” But, he

adds, “It’s deeper than just money. There were mistakes. I made some. She made some. We should have had better communication.” Mary, who was 49 when she learned of all these secret debts,

couldn’t bring herself to leave David. One stumbling block was that she didn’t think she could afford it. Another was religion. “I was raised Lutheran,” she says. “To me, divorce was wrong.”

Instead, they agreed to sell their house. The home equity they’d accumulated was enough to pay their back taxes. They’d start all over with a clean slate. And this time, she’d pay

meticulous attention to the money. They separated their bank accounts and credit cards. And she started regularly pulling her credit report to make sure nothing was amiss. Yet living in

their rented townhouse, Mary was still miserable — ­married to a man she no longer trusted. She had always been a runner. But when her runs didn’t ease her stress, she started training for

an Ironman triathlon — a race comprising a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, then a full 26.2-mile marathon. “People would say to me, ‘Training takes so much time. Don’t you want your

time back?’ ” Mary remembers. “But it took my mind off all the other things in my life that weren’t going right.”