When there was a bill, it found its way to me, the way water finds its way downhill, by a law of nature no one had to enforce because everyone had already agreed to it, decades ago, before I was old enough to object.

Her husband, Daniel, was a cardiac nurse, a good and gentle and exhausted man who had been working double shifts for weeks to cover the VIP maternity suite Rebecca had insisted on.

He was, though neither of us knew it yet, the only other person in the family who occupied a role anything like mine — the other one who paid.

We were about to find out exactly how much, and for what.

Chapter 3 — Five Thousand Four Hundred

I sat in my car in the hospital parking garage, and I did the thing a risk analyst does when the ground gives way, which is to stop feeling and start looking at the data.