Ten minutes later, a text buzzed in from Karla. Did something go wrong with your bank account?

My mortgage payment didn’t process.

I looked at it, and I did not reply, and I felt something almost like wonder at the phrasing. My mortgage payment.

Not the money you send me. Not the payment you’ve been making for four years. My mortgage payment, as though it were hers, as though her own money paid it, as though the eight hundred and fifty dollars that had left my account every month for four years were a law of nature she had never had to think about.

Five minutes passed.