For what, I said, though I knew.

A smaller payment, he said.

My thumb hovered over my mother’s name in the contacts, and then it moved away on its own, the way it always did, and I heard myself say the sentence I had been saying to myself for three years.

I will talk to them after the birthday.

Marcus did not argue.

He put the receipts into the folder where we kept the household bills.

But one of his little folded squares stayed on the table between us, and neither of us moved it, and I understood that the after-the-birthday I kept promising was not a date on any calendar.