“Hi, Dad,” I said, sitting down in the wooden chair across from him.

He took his linen handkerchief out of his coat pocket and started polishing his reading glasses, pausing long and deliberately between each wipe.

“Your mother didn’t sleep last night,” he said.

“Emma didn’t sleep either,” I said.

“She woke up crying three times because her head hurt.”

My father laid his glasses on the table and reached into his inside coat pocket.

He took out a plain white legal envelope, thick and unsealed, and slid it slowly across the little wooden table until it touched my paper napkin.