It made me feel awake.

There is a specific humiliation in that number that I have never fully been able to describe to anyone who has not lived some version of it.

It was not only that he loved her, or wanted her, or had betrayed me — those are old human failures, and painful, but comprehensible.

It was the ranking.

He had sat down, at some point, with the finite resources of our shared life, and he had allocated them, and the allocation was a document of exactly what he thought each of us was worth.

Eighteen hundred a month for the wife and daughter, and every dollar of it accounted for, questioned, begrudged.