There was a cheque on my kitchen counter for one thousand one hundred and eighty-nine dollars and fifteen cents, which was two hundred and nine dollars and eighty-five cents less than had gone into that building, and which represented the only thing in the world that my son’s entire sacrifice had actually purchased: a fifteen per cent restocking fee.

And a thirty-one-year-old man with a six-year-old and a two-year-old had been suspended from his job on the Friday and would be dismissed the following week.

That is the ledger at the end of the first week.

Nothing gained, two hundred and nine dollars and eighty-five cents burned, one household’s equipment unchanged, one bedroom stripped, and one stranger’s life coming apart in a way we would not fully understand for five months.

My son sat on the end of his bed that evening in a room with a bed, a desk, a wire music stand, a stack of school books and an empty guitar stand, and he said: “So I didn’t do anything.”