And the moment he did, the abstraction collapsed into something unbearable and specific: a woman coming to his house at dawn, cleaning it faultlessly for seven months, and going home each night to a math that did not close, to a last container of formula measured out against a paycheck that was always a few days too far away.

The wage had always looked reasonable from where he sat, because from where he sat he had never had to live inside the gap it left.

That was the thing that shamed him most, sitting in his office with his notepad.

Not that he had paid her too little; the wage was, by every professional standard he had ever applied, defensible.

It was that he had been so completely insulated from the consequences of his own defensible decisions that a person could quietly fail to survive on his payroll, in his own house, for seven months, and he would never have known — would never even have thought to do the subtraction — if he had not happened, on one rainy morning, to overhear her ask her mother for twenty-eight dollars.