Your job is to plan a wedding, not to audit my corporate bank accounts.” The transfer, I said, watching a single droplet run down the front of his blue shirt, has been running every month for ten years.

“Mind your own business,” he said, leaning over the table until I could see the small veins in his temples.

“I do not pay you to question my family’s private arrangements.” He took his briefcase and walked out, his steps heavy across the hardwood, and I stayed at the table for five minutes watching the spilled coffee drip slowly onto the slate floor, and thought: ten years, nine thousand dollars a month, to a clinic three thousand miles away, for a private arrangement a man will overturn a coffee cup rather than explain.

Numbers do not lie.