Nine o’clock came and went and the balance held, and I sat there and felt the strange vertigo of an alarm that does not go off at the time your body has set itself to.

Then I did the thing I had decided to do, the thing that turned a subtraction into a choice.

I transferred five hundred and fifty dollars into Lily’s savings account.

The confirmation appeared, plain and small, the same size the other confirmation had always been, as though the bank could not tell the difference between money sent away to be lost and money moved across the house to be kept.

Lily leaned over the counter.