When his brother Liam lost his job, we — I — had covered his rent for two months and never seen a dollar of it back.

When Brandon wanted to trade his sedan for something luxury, I had emptied my personal account to cover what he couldn’t.

Seven years of it, a river of my money and my time and my labor flowing steadily into his family, and I had called it love, and I had never once added it up, because adding it up felt like the kind of thing a person did when the love had run out.

And standing in that entryway, watching him point at the door, I finally understood that the love had run out a long time ago — that it had, perhaps, only ever run in one direction — and that the clerk in my head had been keeping the books for a reason.