Not a feeling.

Ink.

My father, a meticulous man, had done the one thing that made the feeling undeniable: he had written it down.

He had kept the receipts.

Somewhere in his orderly mind, the love he gave his children had been a series of transactions requiring records, and he had made those records, and then — this was the part that made my hands go cold — he had kept them for thirty years, and moved them from house to house, and finally left them in a box in my own garage, where the daughter he’d filed as a debtor would one day go looking for tax documents and find, instead, the proof that she had not been crazy after all.

Chapter 10 — Recoverable

Danae: dental braces — $2,200.

Recoverable. Danae: summer camp — $350.

Debt. Danae: college tuition — $8,500.

To be reimbursed.