We got through the paperwork in nine minutes and then sat there with nothing between us but eighteen years.

“I want to say something,” Marcus said, “and I want to say the whole thing before you talk, because I’ve been drafting it in my head since about 2017.”

“Okay.”

“I made a joke at a dinner table.” He turned his coffee cup a half turn. “That’s the act. That’s the entire act, Claire. Grandma handed out pieces of paper with an amount on them that was so far past plausible that four adults with graduate degrees independently concluded it was a bit.

And I laughed and I waved mine over my head and I said something about a gas station.

“And I have paid for that joke every single day for seven years. I lost five million dollars. I lost my grandmother — she never spoke to me again, not once, not at Christmas, not when I wrote to her, and I wrote to her four times.