I smoothed the bills flat, and I placed them inside the blue folder, alongside every receipt, where they would wait.

Late that evening, Brandon came through the front door hauling his heavy leather golf bag, smelling of sun and grass and someone else’s good time.

“Everything ready for tomorrow?” he asked, not looking at me, already heading for the stairs.

“Everything’s been taken care of,” I said.

“Perfectly.”

And it had.

I lay awake that night, not out of nerves but out of a kind of quiet astonishment at my own steadiness.

I kept waiting for the guilt to arrive, for the old reflex to kick in — the one that had rescued Brandon’s family from every shortfall for eight years — and it did not come.