“Gerald,” she said.

“Gerald, what happened?

What did they say?”

He didn’t answer her.

He couldn’t.

Whatever the bank had told him had gone so far past anything he could argue with or shout down that, for perhaps the first time in his adult life, my father had nothing to say.

Courtney’s eyes moved to me — sitting on the porch floor in soaked clothes, my knee bruised, my hands over my belly, a paramedic already kneeling at my side.

I must have looked like the most defeated woman in New York.