So I stopped looking.

It was one of the hardest small things I have ever made my own neck do, to keep my face turned toward my daughter and away from the glass, but I understood that a mother’s attention is a kind of instruction, and I was not going to instruct her to wait for people who counted her birthday among the things that could be moved.

That evening, after the last paper plate went into the trash and Lily had carried her crown off to set it beside the couch, I opened the banking app again.

The same five hundred and fifty dollar transfer sat in the history, ordinary and exact, the way it had sat there every Friday for three years.