I am saying you should trust us.

I carried the folder to the door.

I had trusted them, I thought.

That was precisely the raw material the whole thing had been built out of.

Trust us, she had said, as though trust were the thing in short supply, as though the problem were a deficit of my faith rather than a surplus of their dishonesty.

But I had not run short of trust.

I had run short of answers, and those are not the same lack, though my mother needed them to be the same, because if the problem was my failing trust then the solution was for me to try harder to believe, and the money could continue.