Samuel stopped flinching at closing doors sometime around the spring. Sophia started leaving her shoes wherever she pleased, which Anna said was the surest sign of a child who no longer expects to be told to line them up.

My mother comes to dinner now. Not often. Twenty-three years is not a thing you cross in an evening, and neither of us pretends otherwise. But she comes, and she sits, and once I caught her watching me cut Samuel’s food into pieces small enough for a four-year-old, and she had an expression on her face I had spent my whole childhood believing I’d never see again.

Elias said everyone belongs to someone when the number is high enough. He believed it the way some men believe in gravity — as a law that excused them from choosing.

He was wrong, but not for the reason I’d have given before that night. It isn’t that people can’t be bought. Plenty can. It’s that the number he was counting on assumed no one in the room would rather lose the money than sign the thing.

He never met anyone who would. So he never learned it was possible.

I did. It cost me a great deal, and I would pay it again tonight.

THE END.