One of the numbers was treated as a bill the universe sent me.

The other was treated as a wish I might someday be able to afford.

And the strangest part, the part I sat with on the edge of her bed while she turned in front of the mirror, was that I had assigned those tenses myself, without once being asked to, as though some part of me had decided long ago which of the two people the money was really for, and it was not the one in the paper crown.

Sitting there, for the first time, I let the two numbers into the same room, and they did not like each other at all.