Chapter 1 — Friday Is Just Friday

The transfer confirmation sat at the top of my banking app, and I had not closed it after the money left.

Marcus noticed before I did, the way my thumb was pressed against the edge of the phone, holding it the way you hold a thing you are not finished with.

You are still looking at it, he said, packing two slices of bread into the plastic container he took to the warehouse every morning.

I am just checking the amount, I told him.

It is five hundred and fifty dollars, he said.

I know.

You usually close the app.

I did not have an answer for that, because he was right, and because I had been staring at the same four lines for longer than it takes to check a number.

Friday.

Eight fifty in the morning.

Recurring transfer.

Five hundred and fifty dollars.

I keep telling myself Friday is just Friday, I said.

He put the lid on the container and waited, because Marcus had learned a long time ago that the quietest way to get the rest of a sentence out of me was to stop filling the silence.

But Lily keeps growing, I said.

He did not answer that either.

He folded a grocery receipt into a small neat square and slipped it into his shirt pocket, which was a thing he did with every receipt that crossed his hands, as though an expense could be made easier to carry if its corners were squared.