I sat on the edge of her bed with the roll of tape in my hand and watched her admire herself in the crown she had built out of paper and glue, and I thought about the number I had sent that morning and the number on the shoes, and how I had spent three years keeping those two numbers in different rooms of my mind so they would never have to meet.

Five hundred and fifty.

Thirty-nine.

I had called one of them help and the other one a thing we would figure out.

I had also, I realized, been keeping them in different grammatical tenses, which is a quieter trick but a more powerful one.

The five hundred and fifty was always spoken of as settled, a standing fact, a thing that simply happened on Fridays the way the sun came up.

The thirty-nine, and every small number like it, lived in the future conditional, the when-we-can, the after-the-birthday, the we-will-figure-it-out.