I closed the banking app.

The confirmation went dark.

But the question that had been sitting behind the transfer for months did not go dark with it, and I carried it around the rest of that morning the way you carry a stone in a shoe you have decided not to stop and empty.

The question was this, and I could not make it smaller no matter how I turned it.

Why did my father keep telling people that Danny’s family was the one that needed looking after, the one that was finally getting comfortable, when I was the one who sent five hundred and fifty dollars out of my account every single Friday morning before I had finished my coffee?

I did not have the shape of the whole thing yet.

I only had the stone in the shoe, and the sense, growing week by week, that the arithmetic of my own family had never once been shown to me in full, and that I had been paying the balance on a ledger I was not allowed to read.

That is a strange position for a person like me to be in, and I should explain why it stung in a particular professional place.

I spend my days with other people’s accounts, reconciling what came in against what went out, and the first rule of the work, the rule under all the other rules, is that every number has to be able to explain itself.

A figure that cannot say where it came from or what it is for is not a number at all; it is a question wearing a number’s clothes.

For three years I had been sending out the largest recurring figure in my own household budget, and if a client had shown me that line, a weekly outflow of five hundred and fifty dollars with no invoice, no itemization, no answer to the simple question of what it purchased, I would have flagged it in an afternoon.

I had been unable to flag it in three years, in my own books, because the account on the other end belonged to my parents, and love, it turns out, is very good at keeping a number from having to explain itself.

Chapter 2 — Thirty-Nine Dollars

At four thirty that afternoon Lily sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor with one sneaker in her lap, holding the sole together with two fingers while I cut a strip of tape.